Author of the week: Alice LaPlante

last updated 8 January 2015

Short-story writer Alice LaPlante has come up with an unusual way to find drama in a painful subject, said Jane Ciabattari in TheDailyBeast.com. During most of the 10 years since her mother developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s, LaPlante has used writing to process the experience of watching a parent drift in and out of lucidity—but she didn’t think any of that material was suitable for publication. When she turned to dreaming up a fictional mystery, however, something clicked. The protagonist in Turn of Mind, LaPlante’s debut novel, is an Alzheimer’s patient who’s suspected of murdering her best friend yet has been rendered incapable of remembering if she committed the crime. LaPlante herself was in the dark about the character’s guilt through much of the writing. “I didn’t know until 50 pages from the end who committed the crime,” she says.

LaPlante is quick to point out she in no way intended the protagonist to be a portrait of her mother, said Jill Owens in Powells.com. “She’s not based on anyone I know,” she says. But the disease draws out a dark side in the character that LaPlante has seen in her mother too. “There’s a lot of anger and aggression that comes out. It’s not just the forgetting,” she says. To LaPlante, the mystery of the disease is whether or not the kind of anger her mother now frequently indulges in is an expression of the true self. “The things she says—are those just now coming out because some editor is gone, or is it the disease? I don’t think I know the answer to that.”