Showing results by narrator "Ann Hedreen" in All Categories

Ann Hedreen's story of what it was like to become a mom just as her own beautiful, brainy mother began to lose her mind to an unforgiving disease. Arlene was a copper miner’s daughter who was divorced twice, widowed once, raised six kids singlehandedly, survived the turbulent ‘60s, and got her BA and MA at 40 so she could support her family as a Seattle schoolteacher - only to start showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease in her late 50s, taking Ann and her siblings on a long descent they never could have anticipated or imagined.

A work of literary fiction, Hard Times in Babylon tells the story of a man in his early sixties, a husband and father and filmmaker, who is already adrift in a malaise of irrelevance and invisibility when a worldwide plague jolts him with thoughts of suicide. Why bother to live, he wonders, now that the world is facing its apocalypse. As he trudges through the ensuing days and months, seeing nothing but futility all around him, he imagines all the ways he could end things.