翻译

qinsdau

Loving obligations
Sue Miller recalls her father's struggle with Alzheimer's

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

Novelist Sue Miller's beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer's disease is such a unique achievement that it is impossible to adequately praise it. Or accurately describe it.

But for starters, in fewer than 200 pages, Miller offers a moving, emotionally complex portrait of her father—and mother—and their contrasting influences on her life. She provides a fascinating, if disturbing, description of Alzheimer's manifestations in the brain and body. And, almost as an aside, she writes interestingly about how she transmutes and transforms observed experiences drawn from her life into events and characters in her fine, luminous novels.

What Miller does not offer in The Story of My Father is anything resembling a step-by-step guide for the perplexed. "I wanted to write a book that talked about what it felt like to live through the illness with someone whom you love," Miller says during a call to her home in Boston. "I wanted to write in a clear way about what was going on in the illness but also about the sense of confusion and loss one experiences in trying to respond reasonably to an unreasonable person who was once a very reasonable person."

And this Miller certainly does. The course of her father's Alzheimer's disease is central to this narrative. But it is also oddly peripheral to the heart of the memoir. The real story in this quietly amazing book is Miller's effort to understand and even sustain her emotional bond with her father.

Miller's father, James Nichols, was a respected church historian at the University of Chicago and, nearing the end of his career, at Princeton. A deeply religious man, Nichols was, says Miller, "incredibly considerate of other people, in almost an abstract way. As I write in the book, in a certain sense he considered everyone equally, and that was a problem being a child of his."

Miller remembers when she was a child sometimes doing things with her father and "feeling his shyness and my shyness and this sense of great effort and work being together, that he was working very hard and I was working very hard. I think that's unusual for a little girl to feel about her father."

By contrast, Miller's mother, a poet, "was excessive in all she did." She seemed to demand and absorb all the family's emotional energy. Yet it is clear from Miller's memoir that her mother and father were, improbably, very much in love throughout their marriage.

"My mother was very difficult and demanding," Miller says, "but my father loved her through all that. Once or twice he spoke a little sharply to her, but that was it. Those were memorable occasions because that was all, ever. I'm sure there were times when things were hard for him, but he understood life as a series of loving obligations. That's what being as deeply Christian as he was can do for you—it makes burdens feel light. [He believed] there are few things which can give as much joy, as much meaning to life as doing something for someone else that you know no one else can do. I think my parents had a very intensely loving relationship."

Miller herself seems to have remained somewhat distant from her father until after her mother's death. Ironically, she and her father began growing closer as Alzheimer's disease slowly destroyed him. Since she was the sibling who lived nearest to him, Miller saw him most frequently and seems to have been the primary decision-maker overseeing his care. She describes his decline and her reactions to this decline with directness, intelligence, even humor, which lends an unexpected poignancy to the book.

Miller's father died in 1991. For 10 years she struggled to write about who he was and what his life and death meant to her. In the meantime, she also wrote three novels that she believes were affected to some degree by her work on this memoir. The novel The Distinguished Guest, for instance, is "very much about the death of a parent," she says. And in The World Below "there is sense of the lives of the people we love who have gone before us running underneath our own lives" that derives in part from thinking and writing about her father.

Miller says writing the memoir seemed to prolong her grief. "I felt when I finally finished the book that I had finished something in myself too, that some way of being with him in my grieving was done and my sense of inadequacy as a caregiver was done. This is sort of an apologia for myself as a caregiver. I was still enmeshed in what I hadn't done right while I was writing this book, and that was hard.

"I was so bitter and angry for a long time—on his behalf," Miller says near the end of our conversation. "The disease was just so cruel, particularly to someone who had lived by his intellect. What I slowly came to terms with, by really thinking about my father as I wrote the book, was that that was not a bitterness he would have shared. That helped me let go and be less furious at the illness. There was a kind of softening of my very dark anger. That is something I learned from my father, and from writing about him."

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小说家控告米勒的美丽，备件的回忆录，她与她的父亲在他的疾病和死亡，老年痴呆症等病的是这样一个独特的成就是不可能的，以充分的赞扬。或者准确描述它。

但刚开始，在不到200页，米勒提供了一个感动的，在感情上复杂的画像，她的父亲和母亲与他们形成对比的影响，对她的生命。她提供了一个有趣的，如果不安，说明老年痴呆症的表现，在大脑和身体。和，几乎与旁白，她写道：有趣的是如何，她transmutes及变换观察得出的经验，从她的生命溶入事件与人物，她被罚款，夜光小说。

什么米勒并不提供在故事中的我的父亲，是什么类似于逐步引导，为困惑。 "我想要写一本书说，谈到什么，它就象要渡过疾病与人，其中你爱， "米勒说，在通话中，以她家在波士顿。 "我想要写一明确的路大约什么事就在生病，但也关乎意识的混乱和损失，其中的经验，试图回应合理不合理的人，曾经是一个非常合理的人" 。

这是米勒，的确是。过程中她父亲的阿尔茨海默氏症是这方面的核心叙事。但是，这也是古怪周边至心脏的回忆录。真实的故事，在这静静惊人书是米勒的努力，理解和支持，甚至她的感情纽带，与她的父亲。

米勒的父亲，詹姆斯尼科尔斯，是一位德高望重的教会史学家，在芝加哥大学，并即将结束他的职业生涯中，在普林斯顿。一个深宗教男子，尼科尔斯是，米勒说： "令人难以置信，顾及其他人，几乎是一个抽象的方式，正如我在写这本书，在一定意义上，他认为人人平等，这是一个问题，作为一个孩子，他"

米勒回忆，当她还是小孩，有时做的事，她的父亲和"感觉他的胆怯和我的胆怯和这个意义上的巨大努力和工作在一起，他是非常努力地工作，我是非常努力地工作，我认为这是很不寻常一个小女孩的感觉，她的父亲" 。

对比之下，米勒的母亲，一位诗人" ，是过分的一切，她没有" 。她似乎需求和吸收一切家庭中的情感能量。但很显然，从米勒的回忆录中说，她的母亲和父亲，大大，十分热爱他们的婚姻。

"我的母亲是非常困难和要求， "米勒说， "但我的父亲爱她透过这一切。一次或两次，他的发言有点尖锐，以她的，但那是它那些人难忘的场合，因为这是所有的，任何时候都。我敢肯定，有些时候事情他很难，但他了解人生了一系列的爱的义务，那绝对是被作为深受基督教，因为他能为你做些事，使负担，觉得轻。 [他相信：有有几件事可以让更多的喜悦，因为太大的意义，以生命做一些事情，别人说你也知道，没有其他人可以做的，我想我的父母产生了非常浓厚的爱的关系" 。

米勒本人似乎仍有点遥远，从她的父亲，直到她的母亲的死因。讽刺的是，她和她的父亲开始日益密切，作为阿尔茨海默病的慢慢毁灭他。由于她是兄弟姊妹住最接近他说，米勒看到他最经常，并似乎已被主要决策人监督他的照顾。她描述了自己的下降和她的反应，这种下降与直接因果关系，情报，甚至幽默，它适合于一个意想不到的poignancy以这本书。

米勒的父亲死于1991年。 10年来，她挣扎就写他是谁和他有什么生死攸关的意思，她的。在此同时，她还写了三部长篇小说，她认为受到一定的影响，由她做这方面的工作回忆录。小说尊敬的客户，举例来说，是"十分关心父母其中一方去世， "她说。并在世界上下面的"有责任感的人的生活，我们爱的人已经摆在我们面前跑下，我们自己的生活， "这是源自于从思想和写作，她的父亲。

米勒说，写回忆录，似乎以延长她的悲伤。 "我觉得当我终于完成这本书，我已经完成了一些对自己太，即以某种方式正在同他在我的悲伤是做了我的责任感不足之处，作为一个照顾者，是做了，这是排序的一个纵容，为自己照护，我还是陷入了，我没有做过的事情，正确的，而我写这本书，这是很难的。

"我是如此的痛苦和愤怒，在相当长的时间就代表他， "米勒说，临近结束时，我们的交谈。 "此病只是这么残忍，尤其是那些住在他的智力。我慢慢来计算，真正思考我的父亲，因为我写这本书的是，这并没有怨恨，他将分享。这让我放手那么疯狂，在病情有一种柔软的，我非常黑暗的愤怒，那是我从我的父亲，并从写他" 。