Jan's Story

by Katie Couric

First published 2010

Barry Petersen stands at his kitchen counter, watching his wife Jan struggle to remember how to make coffee. The CBS News correspondent married Jan twenty-five years ago, never imagining their wedding vows would face such a test. Jan has early onset Alzheimer's disease. At fifty-five, she can no longer recognize Barry or recall the decades they built together. Barry watches the woman he loves disappear piece by piece, her memories vanishing like morning fog. He must navigate each day as Jan becomes a stranger in their shared home. The disease steals not just Jan's mind but reshapes Barry's entire world. He faces an impossible choice between honoring his marriage vows and accepting that the woman he married no longer exists in any way she can understand.

Genres: contemporary, non-fiction, biography-memoir, family-drama

Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking

Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator

224 pages · ebook · Behler Publications

Content warnings: mental-illness

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