Not precisely a book about Alzheimer’s—I don’t think the word is ever mentioned—it’s a memoir of the author’s difficult mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon, who has led a full if troubled life, and now lives in a nursing home. Mary Gordon shows her own desperation, but explains that she writes about her mother in order to witness to “the mystery of an impossible love.”

A powerful story by a gifted novelist. Sue Miller (The Good Mother, Lost in the Forest) discovers that her father has been found wandering the roads at night, knocking on a stranger’s door at four in the morning to ask for help. Alzheimer’s has come on in a rush, and chaos threatens. Miller’s steady hand shows how the disease can both separate people and bring them closer together.

Here’s a story that stands out among Alzheimer’s memoirs, of a woman taking care of her one-year-old daughter and her eighty-year-old father: one a blooming child, learning everything, the other an anxious old man, forgetting everything. Poignant stories, clear writing and a candid delivery make for a quiet but gorgeous book.

This one is not a memoir, but a grounded and persuasive treatise on how drug companies and medical scientists—of which, by his own account, Whitehouse was one—have recast a condition akin to natural aging, turning it into a catastrophic disease to be fought by medicinal and genetic research. We would do better, the author explains, to pay more attention to actual patient care.

A gritty report by the daughter of a woman who, in her prime, we all would have wanted to know, someone “hip, cool, brilliant, funny, sane.” As Mary Durant slides deeper into Alzheimer’s, the job of taking care of her often overwhelms the author and her partner, but the ride is brilliantly described.

While not actually a book about Alzheimer’s, I list Mairs’ book here because I found it so enlightening on the subject of loss. This is the essence of Alzheimer’s: how it robs the patient of memory, language and reason. With every paragraph, it’s clear that Mairs understands what it is to lose our human capacities.

A wrenching set of vignettes about O’Dell’s outspoken, demanding and prejudiced mother. Once a revered minister, now she’s driving everyone in the O’Dell household crazy . This is a direct portrait of how disruptive Alzheimer’s can be on a family, as the patient’s selfish demands threaten to overwhelm everyone else.

Like many other Alzheimer’s memoirs, this turns out to be about much more than a difficult disease. It’s a rich portrait of a woman, her son, and other members of their family: evocative, redemptive, and fully satisfying. With its many stories, and with the author’s precise and evocative language, it’s closer to Nabokov or Virginia Woolf than to The Thirty-Six Hour Day.

Levine’s "Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex," raised a ruckus among the socially and politically conservative. This memoir about her father’s dementia is less controversial, but shows how Alzheimer’s radiates through whole families and communities. An articulate report on the wide repercussions of the disease.

A short history of the author’s own experience with her husband, then a compilation of hundreds of quotations from patients, family members, caregivers, authors and counselors, all speaking about dementia. There’s no narrative to the quotes, though they are roughly grouped according to topic. I drank the book in and never tired of it. I wanted to read on and on.

Another book that’s not precisely about Alzheimer’s. Reeve Lindbergh looks after her mother, the well-known Anne Morrow Lindbergh, after Anne suffers a series of strokes and pretty much stops speaking. The fascination to me was the tremendous frustration of living with a loved one who’s gone silent.

Most Alzheimer’s cases develop over the course or months or years. Jack Stewart’s came on so fast that his wife thought he’d had a stroke, and from one day to the next Linda Stewart’s life shrunk to fit the limits of a confused and forgetful husband. A scary scenario, and a spirited report.

A first-person account of early-onset Alzheimer’s, somewhat muffled by the many long quotations from the magazines Biochemistry and Neurology, and the 1999 “Progress Report on Alzheimer’s Disease” from the National Institute on Aging. DeBaggio is at his best when he sticks to his own life and describes how dementia is undermining it, even as he writes.

The earliest book I know of written by an Alzheimer’s patient. Short, hopeful, and engaging, it naturally doesn’t cover the later stages of the disease, but offers a valuable perspective on the start of early-onset dementia. The author was only 45 when her first memory lapses and disorientation began to affect her.