Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms

“An unflinching look at suffering that is also suffused with beauty .”

— Wendy J. Fox, Buzzfeed

Head Case is a memoir in fragments, a lyric experiment in the immediacy of grief. Written during the end stages of my father’s Alzheimer’s Disease, Head Case chronicles the visceral and often painful experience of a daughter watching her father disappear. In 2010, I moved from Los Angeles to Florida with my then-husband to be near my parents as they navigated my dad’s early Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 52. During this time, I spent days with dad—painting, listening to music, taking walks, reading poems, sitting on the porch and later in the courtyard of his memory facility—and recording these moments while examining my own memories through the lens of narrative, mythology and religion, visual art, migraines, ghosts, poetry, and science—all, I think, to understand what it means to be a human unraveling. In the end, Head Case is both a deep lament for a well-loved man and an exploration of what it means to live a good life.

praise for Head Case

  • “Head Case is a marvel of a book. Its form: narrative, anecdotal, elliptical and historical, suits the subject perfectly…. This book will make you better understand yourself as well as the human condition.”

    —John Skoyles, author of Driven and Suddenly It's Evening: Selected Poems

  • “Alzheimer’s disease disorients not only the patient, but everyone in their orbit. It seems like an impossible task to convey, in writing, what this experience is like. And yet Alexis Orgera succeeds—she submerges the reader in a world of linguistic chaos, blending poetry and medical terminology, memoir and philosophy. I emerged from this book aching with grief for Orgera’s family’s pain, yet grateful for her stark, terrible and beautiful words.”

    —Sarah Leavitt, author of Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me 

  • “Visitations, devastations, genetic codes, feared genetic legacies, the history and the science of tangles, plaques, even vascular dementia—it is all there, unsparingly there, in Head Case. Sometimes grammar isn’t big enough to contain the story, and words ram into words. Certainly, chronology has no place in this; bewilderment sets the pace. Still, and always, Orgera is clear-eyed and specific, she is specifically heartbroken, mired at times in her own breakdowns, clawing her way out of migraines and loss. Clawing, and then lifting.”

    —Beth Kephart, Wife | Daughter | Self: a memoir in essay

  • “With unblinking honesty, Orgera’s kaleidoscopic narrative folds together family history, medical research, philosophy, theology, art and poetry, in her quest to understand the magnitude of such staggering loss. ‘What invisible rope connects father and daughter?’ Orgera asks. The answer—sustained across the most heartbreaking and unbridgeable gap—is the utmost in love and witness.”

    —Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors