Interview about author Mary MacCracken

Today I am talking about author Mary MacCracken and her latest memoir, The Memory of All That, with her daughter Susan Thistle. As her mother died just before completing this book, her daughter is seeing it through publication and is here to chat with us now.

Bio:
An award-winning bestselling author, Mary MacCracken wrote four books about her work with autistic and learning-disabled children: Circle of Children, Lovey, City Kid, and Turn-About Children before her last memoir, The Memory of All That. Her earlier books have been published in fourteen countries and the first two were made into movies for television, starring the actress Jane Alexander. Her books have recently been republished (the first and last under new titles, The Lost Children and A Safe Place for Joey) and still attract a wide readership. Mary spent her last years with her husband, Cal, an inventor with eighty patents, at Kendal at Hanover, a Continuous Care Retirement Community in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the decade after his death writing about their experiences dealing with his disease.

Welcome, Susan. Please tell us about your mother’s current release
The Memory of All That is the story of my mother’s love affair and long marriage to her brilliant husband, Cal—and of losing him to Alzheimer’s. It’s not a dark tale of defeat or despair, but an incredible love story filled with courage and resolution. Having helped each other through initial setbacks in their work, the two face Alzheimer’s with the same resourcefulness they’d shown earlier. Cal confronts the disease bravely, determined to overcome it much as he had earlier misfortunes. My mother, knowing they can’t stop his decline, finds ways for them to continue to enjoy their loving life together despite a changing set of challenges as the disease progresses. In the end, they don’t beat Alzheimer’s. But it doesn’t win either, as they share sweet moments even in their last days and their love persists all through and beyond the disease.

What inspired your mother to write this book?
My mother and her husband Cal had an exceptionally loving and supportive relationship. When Cal first learned he had Alzheimer’s he vowed they’d beat the disease and write a book about this. My mother applauded his idea but put her efforts into doing things with Cal he still excelled at, helping him preserve a sense of self-worth and dignity despite his decline. Then after losing him she was simply too sad to write anything at first.

But she saw the book as something she had promised Cal and that she might be able to give to others. She hoped to help those facing Alzheimer’s, by providing them with an understanding of what the disease is like, how it changes over time, and how to handle the problems that arise. She also wanted to show that the disease was not terrifying or shameful, and that love could be kept alive throughout it.

 

Excerpt from The Memory of All That: A Love Story about Alzheimer’s
From Prologue

It was almost dark when I heard Cal’s car pull into the driveway. I hurried down the stairs from my office, but Cal was already in the kitchen when I got there. He was standing very still, making no move to greet me.

“What?” I asked.

“Read this,” he said quietly, holding out a letter.

“What is it?” Something was wrong. No hug. No kiss. Not like other nights.

“Just read it.”

I skimmed the letter.

“We regret to inform you that we are unable to accept your application for long term life insurance because of your existing condition of Alzheimer’s disease.”

“What’s this about Alzheimer’s disease? And when did you apply for long term insurance?”

Cal shrugged. “Thought it was a good idea.”

“And what about Alzheimer’s?”

Another shrug.

This wasn’t like Cal. We usually told each other everything. I walked over and put my arms around him. “There must be some mistake. It was just last month that we went in to see that neurologist, that doctor who was so highly recommended. Neither of us liked him much. But even if we didn’t, we did like what he told us: ‘Just a mild memory loss, nothing serious.’”

“Well, that’s not what he told the insurance company,” he replied. “I’ll tell you what, though. If it turns out I do have Alzheimer’s, you and I will beat it. And then we’ll write a book about how we did it. Okay?”

“Okay,” I answered, thinking how nothing ever really got Cal down. He just kept working away doggedly until he won. I’d watched him come back in dozens of squash and tennis matches. Even more impressive, before we married (a second marriage for us both) he’d had a calamitous misfortune with one of his inventions and had to declare bankruptcy. But he had paid off all his debtors and now his company was successful, respected, and making money.

Encouraged by him, I’d come back from losing my teaching job to setting up my own practice, and the books I’d written about the children I worked with had, after many rejections, been published. We were doing fine financially and were very much in love. It seemed nothing could stop us.

That night, lying in bed waiting for sleep to come, I smiled, remembering a time just before our wedding. We met at a favorite place, the Cloisters. We sat on the cliff in front of the massive building above the Hudson River and almost immediately Cal handed me a small box. He said, “A present for you.”

I opened it and took out a silver bracelet with three charms. I touched each one. First a mask of joy and sorrow.

“We’ve known both,” Cal said.

Then, a silver heart.

“Mine,” he added.

I puzzled over the third charm and finally asked, “Cal, why did you give me a cash register?”

“Oh Lord,” he said, taking the bracelet and studying the charm. “I thought it was a typewriter.”

We laughed over this many times afterwards, and decided it was a lucky omen.

I rolled back into the hollow in the middle of our big bed and fitted myself against Cal’s warm, sleeping body.

How could he have Alzheimer’s? It didn’t seem possible.

 

Was your mother working on any other exciting stories?
Yes, though it was also a sad one. When my mother was a little girl, her older brother Robert, setting off on his bike to school on a foggy winter morning, was hit by a car and killed. This accident remained vivid for my mother throughout her life, and she was working on a book about how she and her parents recovered from her brother’s death until she turned to writing her love story about Alzheimer’s.

As a child she had thought “I could put Robbie back together again.” I think this feeling gave rise to her strong desire to work with autistic and learning-disabled children, and to help her beloved husband Cal as his brilliant mind failed him.

When did your mother first consider herself a writer?
My mother was always involved in writing. She was the editor of her high school newspaper, and as a young mother wrote an article about raising twins. Asked once near the end of her life to name the three things most important to her, she quickly replied, “Family, friends, writing.”

Did your mother write full-time? If so, what was her work day like? If not, what did she do other than write and how did she find time to write?
This is a great question, because finding a way to support oneself as a writer and still have time to write is a central challenge. For my mother, teaching provided some income, though not much initially, and gave her time to write in the summers.

So, when working on her earlier books, my mother was teaching or, later, working with children with learning-disabilities during the school year and didn’t write much during the week, though she made daily notes of her experiences with the children she saw. On weekends and in the summers, she got up early, filled a mug with coffee, and went out to an old dusty loft over an unused garage by their little house in the country. She’d sit up there and write at least eight pages a morning, hoping to turn her notes into a book. In the evenings she’d read what she’d written aloud to Cal. “I can’t wait to hear what you write tomorrow,” he’d always say.

She retired from working with children soon after Cal was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. After losing him the issue was not how to find time to write but how to move past her grief into beginning the book Cal so wanted. Then she learned of a writing course. “She showed up in a class,” the teacher remembers, “and said she had something to write but just wasn’t able to get it down on paper. And finally she began, and story after story emerged. She was such a good writer.”

What would you say was your mother’s most interesting writing quirk?
My mother loved to write on big yellow pads of paper. She’d start out writing anything to get going, how the loft was cold, how her coffee was growing cold, how this or that small worry nagged at her, how she couldn’t think of anything to write. Then she’d begin to describe an incident and become caught up in its action. She liked using pads of paper because she could rip off the parts filled with nothing much, or first efforts gone wrong, and crumple them up and throw them out. She also loved revising what she had written, going back over it again and again till the words finally worked for her.

As a child, what did your mother want to be when you grew up?
My mother always wanted to be a writer, and to help others, even as a little girl.

Anything additional you’d like to add?
My mother’s hope for her book about Alzheimer’s was that it might be of use to others facing the disease. I hope this also.

Links:
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Susan, thank you for joining my blog and sharing your mom’s novel and letting us get to know a bit about who she was.