Child of Earth and Starry Heaven
L. Annette Binder’s sensitive, grounded, and hopeful memoir Child of Earth and Starry Heaven is about the family impact of Alzheimer’s disease.
Binder taps into a range of literary and scientific sources to reflect on her mother Helena’s labyrinthine decline due to Alzheimer’s. From Binder’s reluctance to attend high-school German classes when she was twelve years old to her mother’s comments about what constitutes “hooker” shoes, Binder braids childhood memories and moments throughout Helena’s life with the writing of poets, biologists, philosophers, and novelists on dementia.
The prose is infused with love, exhibiting the grace Binder found in others and for herself. Helena ended up on a memory-care floor where residents had boxes of mementos by their doors, reminding visitors of the lives they led. One was an Antarctic explorer; someone else kept a rabbit figurine in her pocket. Binder describes residents cooing over a baby doll, caring for stuffed animals, and cursing when a beloved Yankees blanket was threatened. These observations underpin her belief that each elder’s intrinsic personhood remained, even if it wasn’t obvious from the outside.
As dementia stole Helena’s memories and personality, Binder was still able to speak with her mother in German and took heart in sharing that act of love. The careful sources throughout are another kind of sharing, emphasizing the universality and timelessness of humanity’s struggle with neurodegenerative diseases. Despite the book’s inevitable ending, there is no sense of tragedy to be found—only kinship.
A thoughtful memoir, Child of Earth and Starry Heaven examines dementia’s fallout with compassion and the clarity of hindsight.
Reviewed by
Aerin Toskas
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
