Vassar was helpless to stop, or even slow, his mother's descent into dementia.
Two years ago she decided to pay for the publication of her memoir about her mother's descent from California beauty queen to street person to murder victim.
Faith is a resilient child with a vivid imagination trying to absorb and survive her parents' marital strife and her mother's descent into madness.
For a short book "All Gone" is crammed with incident: Ms. Witchel's childhood, her mother's descent into dementia and how Ms. Witchel fell into journalism and met her husband, Frank Rich, a former theater critic and columnist for The Times.
Solnit's personal "story of sorts" brings together episodes from a difficult year in her life, one that included a breakup, a brush with her own mortality, and her mother's descent into Alzheimer's.
Or when a priest remembers his mother's descent into senility: … and then the day came when he had to admit that she no longer knew who he was, had become like a dog kennelled out too long.
Luckily these lapses are saved by the fact that Ephron's observations are sharper than most, and her accounts of her mother's descent into alcoholism and her own tussle with ageing give this collection some much-needed substance.
In September 2005 his fans were introduced to a new side of Bennett when he published the memoir Untold Stories, in which he looked back affectionately at his parents, poignantly reflected on his mother's descent into senility and her death in a nursing home, and revealed for the first time that he had received treatment for what had been believed to be terminal cancer.
But the story soon turns quieter and conveys a profound urban loneliness as the Jians deal with the father's business troubles, his high school sweetheart, the grandmother's coma, the mother's descent into depression and a variety of other troubles.
He had rights to that name either through his mother's descent from the Asens, themselves related to the Komnenoi, or through his marriage to Anna Palaiologina.
