In Person

Ron Rozelle at Book People

"He opened the door and looked at me a moment before speaking. 'I can't find Alene,' he said. I told him, again, about her trip and that we were staying with him. He clinched his lips into his familiar half smile. 'Good,' he said.

'Let's go to bed now,' I suggested.

And my father touched my arm. 'Now, tell me again,' he said. 'Who are you?'"

It's no mistake that Farrar, Straus & Giroux chose that passage to quote on the back cover of Ron Rozelle's elegant memoir Into That Good Night: It's a signature moment in the book, the first full crashing of his father's Alzheimer's disease into his own life. The first, perhaps, but not the last, and in the coming months Rozelle watched his once-proud father slip still further from the precision and control that had been hallmarks in his life.

"He'd remember, literally, every team that played in the Cotton Bowl Classic for the last 30 years," Rozelle told a small audience at Book People last Wednesday night, "but not remember me or what he had for breakfast. ... [We] went through hell."

After his father died, Rozelle picked up his pen and started writing -- not about his father's death so much as his life, of the memories Rozelle still held of his father in the fullness of his self. The resulting book, which intertwines memories of Rozelle's youth with the story of his father's decline, is a simple and sometimes startling memoir, elegiac and wistful without indulging the obvious or sentimental, a small-town Texas tale of a son, a father, a mother, and the twilight of their time together.

It is also a minor publishing miracle: Plucked out of the slush pile on a slow day by editor Ethan Nosowsky, Into That Good Night became the first unagented manuscript that Farrar, Straus, & Giroux published in five years. It has appeared to glowing reviews in Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, Texas Monthly, and several state newspapers, and gained Rozelle some private applause in the form of letters of thanks from readers "all over" who have struggled with the ghost of Alzheimer's in their own lives.

It's a shame, then, that there was such a small crowd on hand to greet Rozelle: Most of the dozen or so in attendance were friends and acquaintances from back home. There was something of a small-town-around-the-stove feel to the reading, with old cronies catching up, swapping jokes and gossip about the old times in East Texas. I would not have been surprised to see Rozelle turn to me and ask, "And how's Marilyn? Does she like her new house? And Jake? Still chasing squirrels?," as if Knoxville, Tennessee, were no further from his purview than Oakwood or Palestine. But there was no such moment: just a brief talk, a brief reading, and a bit of time inscribing books for those few familiar faces that came to greet Rozelle and congratulate him on his improbable success. -- Jay Hardwig