Stefan Merrill Block

When I was a small child, my grandmother was diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease. At that time, I hardly knew what the disease was (I thought the word was "Old-Timer's"). For the first year or two of her decline, her symptoms were subtle and I was too young to notice anything unusual. By the time my mom invited my grandmother to come stay with us, however, the disease was in its middle stages, and I was old enough to understand that something was deeply wrong. Just before my grandmother arrived, my mom explained to me what I should expect: cognitively, I was now more advanced than she. Difficult as it was to comprehend, I would now have to think of myself as more mature than my grandmother. I would have to watch out for her, like a brother would for his little sister. During this conversation, my mom also made me aware, for the first time, of our genetic inheritance: when my mom made a list of her mother's ancestors, nearly everyone, on both her father's side and her mother's side, had developed Alzheimer's disease.

Years later, struggling to begin my book, I often thought about my grandmother and our family's disease. Days before I took a trip home to Texas for the holidays, I read David Shenk's The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic. Reading Shenk's detailed account of the epic pathology of Alzheimer's disease, I continually compared his descriptions with my own family's experiences. And my first night back in Texas, having dinner with my family, a sickening realization: in the disease's persistent march through the generations of our family, was it already starting to come for my mom? How could I know whether it was an early effect of the disease or simply my mom's lifelong touch of flightiness that gave her difficulty instantly conjuring my name, or remembering stories I had told her over the phone just days before? For the first time, I began to think about the terrible and inevitable role reversal that has taken place in every generation of my mom's family: the time when the child must become the parent's caretaker. I was terrified, of course, but I also felt something else, something overwhelming and dazzling in the absolute power of history, as expressed in our genetic material. It seemed to me then, as it still does now, that our inextinguishable, undeniable genetic inheritance touches upon something essential about what it means to be a part of a family.

In the months of writing that preceded this trip to Texas, I had experimented with a lot of narrative voices, but I hadn't yet been able to master a voice that I felt I could fully embody and enjoy. I had, in fact, written over fifteen hundred pages. Essentially nothing of what I wrote in the first nine or ten months now remains. In those early months, I would often write myself into corners; desperate for ways out, I would grasp at new plot lines that would quickly disintegrate under the strain. It was often torturous. Now, in hindsight, it feels like that early work was dictated by some sort of homunculus residing in my subconscious, some invisible foreman who knew better than I what I was doing, who knew what I really wanted to write, who directed me, through failure after failure, toward the writing of what became a very personal novel, steeped in my actual experiences.

Just days after my trip home to Dallas, through some confluence of my thoughts about Texas, my family, and Alzheimer's disease, I began typing and the voice of Abel Haggard simply, suddenly came. The remarkable difference from everything else I had written up to that point was that with Abel I didn't need to plan what I would write in advance; I just wrote and the details and stories materialized, until eventually the writing felt more like remembering than imagining.

After writing for a month or two in the shaggy voice of this old and regretful man, another voice also began to emerge, that of a younger, optimistic foil to Abel. This voice belonged to Seth Waller, and it wasn't long before I was comfortable writing in both his more academic (in the Genetic History chapters) and more personal forms.

I can't really say why these two voices immediately felt right when inter-cut with a series of fantastical fables about a land named Isidora that I had written while I was in college. Though all of these narratives eventually became crucial components of a shared, central story, in the beginning I only had a vague, instinctual feeling that they belonged together. I think that, for this book, devising the narrative structure was sort of like playing a chord of music: it's hard to explain why we instantly know if a combination of notes works or doesn't work together, but we know.