Finding the Right Words by Cindy Weinstein

Join us for a book reading and discussion with Cindy Weinstein about her latest book Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), winner of Memoir Magazine’s prize for books.

In 1985, when Cindy was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, her beloved father, Jerry, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was fifty-eight years old. Twelve years later, at age seventy, he died having lost all of his memories?along with his ability to read, write, and speak.

Finding the Right Words follows Weinstein’s decades-long journey to come to terms with her father’s dementia as both a daughter and an English professor. Although her lifelong love of language and literature gave her a way to talk about her grief, she realized that she also needed to learn more about the science of dementia to make sense of her father’s death. To write her story, she collaborated with Bruce L. Miller, MD, neurologist and director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, combining personal memoir, literature, and the science and history of brain health into a unique, educational, and meditative work.

Cindy Weinstein is the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology and an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. She has written several books on US literature with a focus on the nineteenth century. She teaches classes on “The Career of Herman Melville,” “US Literature through the Short Story” and “Poe and his Afterlife.” Currently, she is writing Always, Nevermore: The Unending Death of Edgar Allan Poe under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press, and Essays in my Garden: A Memoir which continues her interest in brain health. Her outreach activities around dementia include speaking at senior residences, in Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers (ADRCs), and in health humanities programs. She is also leading a Hilarity for Charity monthly support group, “Keeping Each Other Company: Caregiving and Grief.”

The discussion will be moderated by Hannah Kirsch, MD, board-certified neurologist and a clinical assistant professor in the Neurocritical Care Division of the Department of Neurology & Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Copies of the book will be available onsite for purchasing and signing. Light appetizers will be served.