Everything Left to Remember

January 24, 2022
Jagger (Unbound) offers a beautiful reflection on love, memory, and inheritance in this heartrending account of a road trip she took through Big Sky Country, one “my mother will never remember and a journey I’ll never forget.” After her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2015, Jagger planned a camping trip for the two of them in Montana. Jagger’s prose enchants as she chronicles the stunning natural landscapes they encountered in the state’s mountains and plains, and the internal reckoning she wrestled with regarding her family’s legacy: “My grandmother had dementia. My mother has Alzheimer’s. I am a sapling inside of a forest that seems hell-bent on forgetting.” Also present is the frustration Jagger felt as she guided her mother through terrain unfamiliar to them both—“My mother was losing her mind and I was losing my patience.” While it’s a somber tale—made more immediate against the collapse of the natural world (“Will we still call it Glacier National Park when it no longer has any glaciers? Will I still call her my mother when she no longer knows she has daughters?”)—it’s one that readers will have a hard time forgetting. This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle.

March 1, 2022

The title of Jagger's second memoir (after Unbound: A Story of Snow and Self-Discovery) says it all--the author and her mother, who has dementia, go on the camping trip of a lifetime through the Rocky Mountains, starting in Montana. Jagger reflects on the meaning of memory--her mother's memory, and the author's memories of her mother--through the lens of the camping trip: the roads they traversed and the lush flora and fauna of the Rocky Mountain landscapes. As the trip and the memoir progress, Jagger opens up to her mother (and readers) and unravels deeper memories and family secrets and decides to confront them head-on, before it is too late. Readers will enjoy this elegantly written memoir of a mother and daughter's trip through beautiful terrain, with moments of heartwarming bonding; relatives of people with dementia or memory loss will be particularly touched. VERDICT This grounded, readable, and gracefully written memoir is an interesting take on the road trip genre, particularly relatable to people affected by dementia.--Kelly Karst

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2022
A memoir of Alzheimer's and a mother and daughter's journey across the Rockies and beyond. In this follow-up to Unbound, Jagger chronicles the difficulties of coping with her mother's Alzheimer's, with which she was diagnosed in 2015. Growing up, her family members didn't discuss their feelings. By the time Jagger was a teenager, she writes, "I developed a deep suspicion of emotions....I judged people who displayed them." The author also contends that her parents treated her and her sister differently than her brothers. "I was handed the idea that my fulfillment, my eventual wholeness, was dependent on finding a nice guy," she writes. As an adult, Jagger distanced herself from her mother, and for years, they moved in different directions. As a result, "I'd never really seen my mother...in her totality." Following her mother's diagnosis, Jagger decided that a trip could help their relationship. "This was not the first time I had run to Mother Nature looking for guidance," she writes. With keen insight and thoughtful prose that captures both the emotions involved and the significance of the natural world in the author's life, she recalls their journey across the Rockies, where they shared moments of loss, endured times of frustration, and found genuine joy in nature. Jagger also shares intimate details of the memories that began to surface as well as her reoccurring dreams, which allowed her to begin to make connections between her mother's life and her own. During the process of trying to learn more about her mother, she realized that "this trip was never about unearthing the mystery living inside my mother, but the one that has been living deep inside of me." Solemnly, the author acknowledges that, as her mother begins to forget her, she will be allowed to reclaim herself. "My focus shifted away from the loss," she writes. "It felt, now, that there was much to be gained." A beautiful yet heart-wrenching tribute to the mother-daughter relationship.

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