Her Beautiful Brain: A Memoir

By: Ann Hedreen

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Synopsis: Her Beautiful Brain is Ann Hedreen&’s 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 miner&’s 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 schoolteacher—only to start showing signs of Alzheimer&’s disease in her late fifties, taking Ann and her siblings on a long descent they never could have anticipated or imagined. For two decades—as Ann married, had a daughter and a son, navigated career changes and marital crises and built a life making documentary films with her husband—she 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 Arlene&’s favorite tennis club to a locked geropsychiatric ward, Her Beautiful Brain tells the heartbreaking story of a daughter&’s love for a mother who is lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable and harrowing illness.