I Read ‘The Vanishing Family’ by Robert Kolker Here’s What Stayed With Me

 

Hey readers! I just finished a new release from the popular nonfiction author, Robert Kolker. "The Vanishing Family". Keep reading this blog post to find out what has stuck with me since I finished, and get all of the information you need to decide if you should read it, too.

The Vanishing Family

by Robert Kolker

My rating: ★★★★☆ 4/5 stars

In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to Hidden Valley Road (“Deeply compassionate and chilling,” wrote The Washington Post). This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.

The Vanishing Family unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia—including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful and redemptive, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end. ( from amazon.com)

Book Review and Discussion of
"The Vanishing Family" by Robert Kolker

What Worked For Me

This is just such an incredibly compelling story. My test for non fiction is that when I really enjoy it I always feel like I can give a TED Talk by the end of it, and "The Vanishing Family" absolutely passes that test.

Two things have stuck with me since reading this. I was struck by just how bittersweet the diagnosis stage was for many of the family members. By the time that FTD has taken hold the individual was so seperated from a typical inner or outer emotional response, that the fear, anxiety, depression that one might expect is an unreachable state for them. Many of the family members were in complete denial, thinking that had crushed a cognitive test, or in speaking about another more advanced family member with disconnected pity. Secondly, I was so impressed by the author's ability to capture tender heartbreaking moments between family members, particularly the spouses who stuck with their wives through their diagnosis and disease.

What I Struggled With

Nearly nothing. "The Vanishing Family" is a pitch perfect non fiction book in my opinion. I do wish that there had been a little more medicine. I'd love to dive even deeper into the history of dementia and even the genetic testing that the family members utilized. Genetic traits like these have always existed and it wasn't until recently that we could make sense of, trace, and properly diagnosis them, before symptoms had even emerged. How different an experience this would be 100 or even 50 years ago. I think it would have added to the story but I can also see how the families experience is the focus, and adding more historical elements might take away from their story.

Comment down below if you have read "The Vanshing Family" by Robert Kolker. Let me know what worked for you in this book and what you struggled with while reading. What other non fiction books about medical issues have had an impact on you? Thanks for reading, readers!