Marilyn Smith Neilans

I literally began composing it in my head as the events were unfolding. As I began to face the daily challenges and difficulties of making life care decisions for my failing mother, I realized that I had no real experience in this area. I was quite certain that I was not the first middle-aged daughter to feel overwhelmed and lost. The strong need to form a bond with other women in these circumstances turned into a compulsion to write, and I began putting it all down on paper as soon as I returned to my home after Mom’s funeral.

Because of my life’s own complicated path, and because of the emotional stress of remembering the details that I put down in the book, it took me 17 years to get it to publication. When readers respond with comments like this: “I couldn’t put it down. I laughed a little, cried a little, and thought a lot about my own parents,” I feel I have successfully communicated with my peers.

It will be a memoir “as told to,” and will be about another family’s interesting lives as they reform and regroup after fleeing their homeland of Estonia to re-establish themselves first in Germany in a displaced persons camp, then in the United States. This one is much less emotionally stressful for me to write! Look for it to come out late in 2013 or early 2014.