Alice LaPlante has written four books of nonfiction and the novel, Turn of Mind.
From her Q & A with the Guardian:
How did you come to write Turn of Mind?
My mother has Alzheimer's, so it's a topic we've been dealing with as a family for nearly a decade. I'd tried writing about it, privately, but had trouble getting "at" the material. I tried a short story, and that went nowhere. One night my partner and I were watching the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series on TV, and he asked, "Do you think you could ever write a mystery?" I said, "Of course not!", but a moment later said, "Wouldn't it be funny to have a detective with Alzheimer's who couldn't remember the clues?" He said, "write that!" I knew I couldn't – I know nothing about detectives or detecting … but I thought I do it from the point of view of the suspect. I wrote the first section that night. The mystery provided me with enough of a framework to get at what I considered the really important stuff: the characters and emotions.
What was most difficult about it?
Nothing was difficult about writing it. I was lucky. I was obsessed, and it all came out very easily. It was a very...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
