#25 [2021/CBR13] Let's Never Talk About This Again by Sara Faith Alterman

Amazon describes Let's Never Talk About This Again (2020) by Sara Faith Alterman as a "darkly funny and poignant memoir about love, loss, Alzheimer's, and reviving her father's pornographic writing career." I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting after reading that, but I picked up the audiobook for two reasons. First, it sounded genuinely odd and funny, and I was curious how a daughter revives her father's pornographic writing. Second, my father has been suffering from Alzheimer's and a traumatic brain injury for some years now. I thought I might learn something about how to deal with it. 

Alterman begins with her very sheltered childhood with her particularly prudish father. When Alterman first got her period, he could barely look her in the eye. He was also prone to bursts of anger. It was already an odd combination, but it's even more confounding to both the reader and Alterman when she finds some goofy, pornographic books in her father's study, including Games You Can Play With Your Pussy. And then she realizes that her father is the author of these books. It's quite the revelation considering her childhood, and I wish I had been able to understand him a little better.

Her father's decline is so gradual that she doesn't notice it at first. She just thinks he's acting erratically. Even though she knows about his books, he doesn't know that she knows. So, she's dumbfounded when he announces that he's going back to writing his pornography and he wants her help.

Eventually it becomes clear that more is going on with her father than simple eccentricity. She's told that they'll have time, and that he'll gradually decline. But his disease progresses faster than expected, and it keeps him from getting necessary medical interventions when he gets an infection. 

I found this book consistently interesting, but it wasn't exactly what I expected. I thought the majority of the book would be about them writing pornographic books together, and that it would be really funny in a ludicrous way. I thought the book writing might even bring the father and daughter together for a short time while they could still appreciate it. But it was primarily about his diagnosis and death.

I really appreciate how honest Alterman was with her frustrations with her father when he was declining. It is an exhausting, absurd, and awful thing to see happen to someone you care about, and I could relate to her story. In fact, it hit a little too close to home at times. Unfortunately, this book didn't enlighten me on how to deal with a father with Alzheimer's, it just made me grieve what will inevitably be happening with my own father.