Felt

To what emotional extremes will you go to recover lost memories, or surrender to ones that are impossible to erase?

In this story of a son, his mother, and her Alzheimer’s disease, a small Maritime town transforms into the loom on which the shared and contested memories of three generations are woven, unraveled, and rewoven.

A family’s history is woven, unravelled, and rewoven into a tapestry spanning three generations.

Museum curator Matthew Reade’s career and marriage are in crisis in the aftermath of a recent exhibition. When he gets a worrying phone call about his fiercely independent ninety-six-year-old mother, Penelope, Matt uses the excuse of a research project to return to the Maritimes to check on her for himself. Once home, he finds he must stay on to help navigate her new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.

The more Matt talks to his mother while preparing to move her into the local long-term care home, the more she reveals about his grandmother’s emigration from Norway to New Brunswick before World War I, the murky origins of the family handcraft business, her own complicated past relationships, and Matt’s beginnings. But how much of it can he trust and how much has been rewritten by the disease?