Ann Hedreen is a writer, filmmaker and teacher. She is a fellow in the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program of the Gerontological Society of America, and speaks and writes often about creative aging in 3rd Act Magazine and elsewhere, including her award-winning blog, The Restless Nest. Her memoir, Her Beautiful Brain, won a 2016 Next Generation Indie book award. She lives in Seattle.

Arlene was a twice-divorced, once-widowed copper miner’s daughter who raised six kids singlehandedly and got her bachelor’s and master’s degree at forty so she could support her family. In her late fifties, she started showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease—and in the two decades that followed, her children were forced to stand helplessly by as their mother’s once-beautiful brain slowly unraveled.

In this poignant memoir, Ann Hedreen gives shattering insight into what it is to watch your mother—a woman you once thought of as invincible—begin to disappear. From Seattle to Haiti to the mine-gouged Finntown neighborhood in Butte, Montana where Arlene was born and raised, Her Beautiful Brain tells the heartbreaking story of a daughter’s love for a mother lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable and harrowing illness.