Unflinching, tragic and compassionate, Her Beautiful Brain is a memoir about how Ann Hedreen's life changed when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. She opens in 1969 with the image of the typing class she took at age 12--the mandatory "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" exercise burned into the mind and fingers of anyone who's ever taken a typing course. This flashback transforms into an extended metaphor for gender, class and identity as Hedreen muses about the secretarial path she and her mother shared at the start of their lives before they found their own vocations: "For all the generations of women who typed to feed their children, to get through college, to survive, the words Quick Brown Fox said struggle and survival. They said that this life does not deserve to end in the jammed keys and black ink of Alzheimer's disease."
Hedreen then flashes forward to 1987, when she and her sister, as well as her mother, begin to realize during a trip to Haiti that her mother's brain may not be working as well as it should. Haiti becomes another metaphor of the "fourth world" Alzheimer's forces her mother--and the entire family--to inhabit. As Hedreen guides the reader through her mother's illness, her use of metaphor and imagery is heartbreaking and powerful. Hedreen primarily tells her own story, but includes many vignettes from her mother's early life, so the reader ends with a lasting and intimate portrait of her mother as well as a poignant look at the injustice of this devastating disease. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics