So, I bought my sister a copy of the Walter Mosley book, with an upcoming miniseries starring Samuel L Jackson. The book is amazing, and I wanted to share that with someone who may not be up on it. The below is the note I’m enclosing with the book when I send it. We’re going through a like situation right now, which I’ll explain…at some point.

So, I’m enclosing a book that, well, there’s a lot going on with it. Let me try to explain without writing a college essay. I’ve already saved you form dealing with pages of my handwriting, so I should get some props for that, at least.

First, Walter Mosley.

Dude has been writing for years, and is probably most noted in Hollywood for Devil In A Blue Dress, which was a great movie with Denzel and Don Cheadle. He’s written a number of characters, and seems at home when writing about LA in the 50s-70s. He mentions a ton of familiar places, and his characters are people you’ve known for years, full of Southern wisdom in urban LA. I’ve enjoyed his work for years, and has inspired me to write more myself; we all have stories, right?

Secondly, this book in particular.

When I first read it, the subject hit nowhere close to home as it does now. He wrote this in 2011, and that was before, well, all this. Grandma Jonnie had been dead 10 years, the last person I was familiar with with Alzheimers. The memory of her not remembering who Mom was had subsided. And Grandpa Ennis, well, it was treated with so much silence that it never really registered.

But in the writing, I find probably the clearest language in what a dementia patient is going through. Putting into words the confusion, the anxiety and anger when previous accessible memories just aren’t able to be remembered. The writing is more visceral, more illuminating to understand, even from a fictional standpoint, what’s going on.

He puts a wrinkle in it, though. Sam L Jackson is doing a miniseries on this now, actually, airing on streaming TV. How far are you willing to go to remember, to straighten up your business with one last burst of clarity? Would you make a deal with modern medicine? With the Devil himself? And what would you actually do if you had a clear mind…for a week? Or would you prefer to live out your years in this mental fog? Also, and a nod to our current situation, how to deal with family.

It’s a great story that I want to share with you. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, but this is a peek into the stuff I read and like and aspire to write myself at some point.