Why You'll Love This
A daughter moves home to care for a father losing his memories — and somehow Hoen makes it funny, sharp, and quietly devastating all at once.
- Great if you want: an emotional story about memory, grief, and late self-discovery
- The experience: warm but bittersweet — moves quickly despite heavy emotional terrain
- The writing: Hoen balances dry wit with genuine tenderness without tipping into sentimentality
- Skip if: Alzheimer's narratives are too close to home right now
About This Book
What happens when the person you most need to reconnect with is slowly losing the memories that define him? In Before I Forget, Tory Henwood Hoen follows Cricket Campbell, a twenty-six-year-old drifting through adulthood in the shadow of old grief and new fear — her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis. When Cricket moves back to the family's Adirondack lake house to care for him, she's chasing something that keeps slipping further away: the chance to finally know him, and to be known in return. It's a story about memory and loss, yes, but also about the particular stuck-ness of early adulthood — the feeling of having arrived at your life without quite knowing how.
Hoen writes with a wry, warm intelligence that keeps sentiment from tipping into sentimentality. Her prose is precise where it counts and loose and funny where it needs to breathe, which makes the emotional gut-punches land harder than you expect. The structure mirrors its subject — circling back, catching details you missed the first time — and Cricket's voice feels genuinely alive on the page. This is a novel that earns its tenderness.