Novelist Sue Miller’s beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease is such a unique achievement that it is impossible to adequately praise it. Or accurately describe it.

But for starters, in fewer than 200 pages, Miller offers a moving, emotionally complex portrait of her father—and mother—and their contrasting influences on her life. She provides a fascinating, if disturbing, description of Alzheimer’s manifestations in the brain and body. And, almost as an aside, she writes interestingly about how she transmutes and transforms observed experiences drawn from her life into events and characters in her fine, luminous novels.

What Miller does not offer in The Story of My Father is anything resembling a step-by-step guide for the perplexed. "I wanted to write a book that talked about what it felt like to live through the illness with someone whom you love," Miller says during a call to her home in Boston. "I wanted to write in a clear way about what was going on in the illness but also about the sense of confusion and loss one experiences in trying to respond reasonably to an unreasonable person who was once a very reasonable person."

And this Miller certainly does. The course of her father’s Alzheimer’s disease is central to this narrative. But it is also oddly peripheral to the heart of the memoir. The real story in this quietly amazing book is Miller’s effort to understand and even sustain her emotional bond with her father.

Miller’s father, James Nichols, was a respected church historian at the University of Chicago and, nearing the end of his career, at Princeton. A deeply religious man, Nichols was, says Miller, "incredibly considerate of other people, in almost an abstract way. As I write in the book, in a certain sense he considered everyone equally, and that was a problem being a child of his."

Miller remembers when she was a child sometimes doing things with her father and "feeling his shyness and my shyness and this sense of great effort and work being together, that he was working very hard and I was working very hard. I think that’s unusual for a little girl to feel about her father."

By contrast, Miller’s mother, a poet, "was excessive in all she did." She seemed to demand and absorb all the family’s emotional energy. Yet it is clear from Miller’s memoir that her mother and father were, improbably, very much in love throughout their marriage.

"My mother was very difficult and demanding," Miller says, "but my father loved her through all that. Once or twice he spoke a little sharply to her, but that was it. Those were memorable occasions because that was all, ever. I’m sure there were times when things were hard for him, but he understood life as a series of loving obligations. That’s what being as deeply Christian as he was can do for you—it makes burdens feel light. [He believed] there are few things which can give as much joy, as much meaning to life as doing something for someone else that you know no one else can do. I think my parents had a very intensely loving relationship."

Miller herself seems to have remained somewhat distant from her father until after her mother’s death. Ironically, she and her father began growing closer as Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroyed him. Since she was the sibling who lived nearest to him, Miller saw him most frequently and seems to have been the primary decision-maker overseeing his care. She describes his decline and her reactions to this decline with directness, intelligence, even humor, which lends an unexpected poignancy to the book.

Miller’s father died in 1991. For 10 years she struggled to write about who he was and what his life and death meant to her. In the meantime, she also wrote three novels that she believes were affected to some degree by her work on this memoir. The novel The Distinguished Guest, for instance, is "very much about the death of a parent," she says. And in The World Below "there is sense of the lives of the people we love who have gone before us running underneath our own lives" that derives in part from thinking and writing about her father.

Miller says writing the memoir seemed to prolong her grief. "I felt when I finally finished the book that I had finished something in myself too, that some way of being with him in my grieving was done and my sense of inadequacy as a caregiver was done. This is sort of an apologia for myself as a caregiver. I was still enmeshed in what I hadn’t done right while I was writing this book, and that was hard.

"I was so bitter and angry for a long time—on his behalf," Miller says near the end of our conversation. "The disease was just so cruel, particularly to someone who had lived by his intellect. What I slowly came to terms with, by really thinking about my father as I wrote the book, was that that was not a bitterness he would have shared. That helped me let go and be less furious at the illness. There was a kind of softening of my very dark anger. That is something I learned from my father, and from writing about him."

Bibliophile Paul Collins finds a town that shares his passion If you’re reading this, you probably love books to one degree or another. For Paul Collins, author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, that love is taken to the nth degree. His passion for all things biblio led him to Hay-on-Wye, a small Welsh village on the Britain/Wales border with only 1,500 inhabitants and 40 antiquarian bookstores. “There are easily several million books secreted away in these stores,” Collins explains, “and in outlying barns around the town; thousands of books for every man, woman, child and sheepdog.” Leaving behind a comfortable cosmopolitan existence in San Francisco, Collins traveled with his wife Jennifer and their young son, Morgan, “across the pond” to buy a house, settle in the country and make “The Town of Books” their home. Sixpence House is the result of that journey, but it is more than a delightful travelogue of the family’s adventure. It is the story of books themselves: how they get written, read, or not read, how they come into print and fall out of print, how they are made and how they are destroyed. And, last but not least, it is the story of how a young couple, their child in tow, became brave enough to follow their dreams. “I’ve always wanted to write,” Collins says happily. “Ever since I was a kid, that’s what I wanted to do, and I’m getting to do it. It’s wonderful.” Making life even more wonderful is a wife who has also been bitten by the book bug. “Jennifer is a painter,” Paul explains, “but she writes as well. She’s just finished a young adult book and is now to the point of looking for an agent.” While a quaint, obscure little village crammed to the rooftops with books might seem the perfect place for a couple of artistic wordsmiths, the idyllic setting proves to be a difficult place to buy that “perfect” home. First of all, the buildings in Hay-on-Wye are old, and secondly, determining the condition of a home for sale is up to the buyer. This compels them to commission, and pay for, an engineering survey for any house they seriously consider purchasing. “In America, you can pretty much house hunt for free until you get to the point of signing on the dotted line,” Collins notes, “but in Britain and Wales it gets very expensive very quickly.” Tagging along from an armchair on this side of the pond, however, is great fun for the reader: “Heavy oak floorboards creak beneath our feet,” Collins writes, “immediately to our left is a dark and crowded stairwell. This is a weighty structure, the sort of moany old house under constant compression by the very years themselves; it is not airy.” Collins describes the kitchen of this particular house with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor as “distinctly of 1950 vintage; you half expect an Angry Young Man with a Yorkshire accent to step out and start yelling about working down in the bloody mines.” In storybook fashion, as their money supply dwindles Collins gets a job working for the self-proclaimed “King of Hay,” a man named Richard Booth, a book dealer and the owner of Hay Castle where Collins finds himself employed to sort through a veritable realm of books. The task is daunting, but the job does allow him to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: meandering from one idea to another. “I’m always going off on tangents,” he admits. “I see something and I go, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ and in the process of tracking one story I end up finding five others. So I’m never lacking for material. But because of that, I have a hard time imagining myself writing a strictly single subject book. I’ve decided that’s not what my talent is in. It’s more in throwing myself out there in several directions and hoping that other people will find it interesting as well.” His first book, Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen People Who Didn’t Change the World, capitalized on that same talent. “I guess I have a short attention span,” he says, laughing. “Any one of those 13 people could have warranted a book, but I’d rather write about the 13 and let someone else write about one particular person.” This meandering method works well for Sixpence House. It allows the author to wander off the path, stopping for an anecdote here, a poignant moment there; it allows him time to dust off a book for us, and let us glimpse the ideas and emotions of someone long-forgotten, their words, held in ink, still able to move our minds and hearts; it allows him to tell us stories within his story and to make a quiet, but undeniable statement about the power, the endurance, and the magic of books. But how does a bibliophile feel about computers? “I think computers are a blessing and a headache,” Collins says. “I use computers and databases a lot in my historical research. They’re a tremendous tool, but on the other hand, you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. And they’re a very unstable medium.” But with Sixpence House written and another book in the works, Paul Collins feels good about the future of his obsession and his livelihood. “Paper lasts for hundreds of years,” he says confidently. “I think books are here to stay. Not only do they have an aesthetic pleasure to them, they’re cheap, they’re portable, and they last a long time.” That should make any lover of books sleep a little more soundly tonight! Linda Stankard is a writer in New York.