Her Beautiful Brain

Her Beautiful Brain is Ann Hedreen's story of what it was like to become a mom just as her beautiful, brainy mother began to lose her mind to an unforgiving disease. Arlene was a copper miner's daughter who was divorced twice, widowed once, raised six kids singlehandedly, survived the turbulent ';60s, and got her B.A. and M.A. at 40 so she could support her family as a Seattle schoolteacheronly to start showing signs of Alzheimer's disease in her late fifties, taking Ann and her siblings on a long descent they never could have anticipated or imagined. For two decadesas Ann married, had a daughter and a son, navigated career changes and marital crises and built a life making documentary films with her husbandshe watched her once-invincible mom disappear. From Seattle to Haiti to the mine-gouged Finntown neighborhood in Butte, Montana where she was born and grew up; from Arlene's favorite tennis club to a locked geropsychiatric ward, Her Beautiful Brain tells the heartbreaking story of a daughter's love for a mother who is lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable and harrowing illness.