Her Beautiful Brain: A Memoir

Her Beautiful Brain is Ann Hedreens story of what it was like to become a mom just as her beautiful, brainy mother began to lose her mind to an unforgiving disease. Arlene was a copper miners daughter who was divorced twice, widowed once, raised six kids singlehandedly, survived the turbulent 60s, and got her B.A. and M.A. at 40 so she could support her family as a Seattle schoolteacheronly to start showing signs of Alzheimers disease in her late fifties, taking Ann and her siblings on a long descent they never could have anticipated or imagined. For two decadesas Ann married, had a daughter and a son, navigated career changes and marital crises and built a life making documentary films with her husbandshe watched her once-invincible mom disappear. From Seattle to Haiti to the mine-gouged Finntown neighborhood in Butte, Montana where she was born and grew up; from Arlenes favorite tennis club to a locked geropsychiatric ward, Her Beautiful Brain tells the heartbreaking story of a daughters love for a mother who is lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable and harrowing illness. See more