• General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    Answering Alzheimer’s: Amy Bloom’s
    “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss”

    October 22, 2023 - By 

    Amy Bloom gets right down to it in her 2022 memoir, “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.” The city of Zurich and the fact of her husband Brian’s Alzheimer’s disease comes up in the first paragraph as the couple boards a plane headed to that Swiss city. Their purpose for the trip is revealed in the fourth paragraph, which begins with these two stout declarative sentences: “Dignitas’s office is in Zurich, and that’s where we’re headed. Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization offering accompanied suicide.” Through the subsequent 200+ pages, the multi-talented, much-honored Bloom (novels, short stories, non-fiction,…

  • Personal Reflections

    The Turning Point on the
    (Hopefully) Long Journey Home

    August 14, 2021 - By 

    You reach a point in life—I’m not sure when it began but I know it has—that your people—friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, teammates— who have died begin to rival in number, and feel as present to you, as those who are still living. This represents some kind of turning point no one ever alluded to in my formative years, when they suggested all the exciting things awaiting me in my maturity. No one ever took me aside back then in a candid moment and intoned, “All they’re saying is true, but at a certain point, you will also begin to…