"Throughout her life, acclaimed poet Damian Rogers was never given a satisfactory account of the circumstances around her birth. The "truth" behind the stories she was told by her mother--the free-spirited, beautiful and often troubled Joanna--constantly shifted, and Damian could collect only fragments: a trip to California, a mysterious trauma, a miscarriage followed by a psychotic break, and a dramatic return to Detroit, pregnant. Now, in the present day, as 40-year-old Damian copes with Joanna's debilitating frontal-lobe dementia, she realizes she may never truly uncover the full story. At once a riveting portrait of a time and place (Detroit and Southern California from the mid-1960s to the late-1980s), an unconventional mother-daughter saga, and an exploration of how memory constantly shapes and reshapes our intimate relationships, at its heart An Alphabet for Joanna is a meditation on the relationship between mental illness and creative life. Damian Rogers writes effortlessly across genres, including lyrical memoir, investigative reporting, and powerful philosophical reflection, as she pieces together the ways we build lives out of stories. And by tracing her mother's deterioration into the present day, she poignantly shows how, even when memory fails, we remain connected through art, empathy, and imagination."-- Provided by publisher.