An Alphabet for Joanna

A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments

By: Damian Rogers

Narrated by: Damian Rogers

A gripping memoir from acclaimed poet Damian Rogers about being raised by a loving but erratic single mother who is today diagnosed with a rare form of frontal-lobe dementia. In the vein of Plum Johnson's They Left Us Everything, Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies, Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, and Susannah Cahalan's Brain on Fire.

"Evocative, beautifully written, heartbreaking...of special interest to all whose loved ones suffer from dementia." (Margaret Atwood, on Twitter)

"An Alphabet for Joanna is a braid of tiny stories that weaves us into a nest of belonging despite circumstance and injury.... A memoir of stunning thoughtfulness, Rogers presents us with a loving treatise on what it means to be human." (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson)

Throughout her childhood in Detroit, Damian Rogers was never given a satisfactory account of the circumstances that led to her own birth. The "truth" behind the stories she was told by her mother - the free-spirited, beautiful, and troubled Joanna - constantly shifted, and Damian was left only with fragments: her mom's trip to California in 1969 after finishing high school, a mysterious trauma and psychotic break, then a return to Detroit, pregnant. Now, as 40-something Damian struggles to cope with Joanna's early-onset dementia, she realizes she may never know the full story.

A riveting portrait of a time and place (the leafy suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and working-class neighborhoods of Long Beach, California, in the 1970s and '80s), An Alphabet for Joanna is also an unconventional mother-daughter saga and a creative exploration of how memory shifts and shapes our most intimate relationships. Acclaimed poet Damian Rogers crafts a unique work that is both a moving memoir and a powerful philosophical reflection on how we build lives out of fragments of stories. And by tracing her mother's story into the present day, she poignantly shows that even when memory fails, we can remain connected through a web of art, empathy, imagination, and love.

©2020 Damian Rogers (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

A QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“An Alphabet for Joanna is a braid of tiny stories that weaves us into a nest of belonging despite circumstance and injury . . . A memoir of stunning thoughtfulness, Rogers presents us with a loving treatise on what it means to be human.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

“Succinct, evocative, beautifully written, heartbreaking. . . . of special interest to all whose loved ones suffer from dementia.” —Margaret Atwood

"Told in brilliant prose inter-animated by form and image, this is a poetic narrative and portrait of a mother’s life in fragments. Themes of mother-child, love and separation, memory and forgetting, the violence and fragility of the world next to creative endurance shaped by love--it’s a book that will break your heart and mend it." — Hoa Nguyen