Making memories Michael Stein’s moving This Room Is Yours BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
	This Room Is Yours By Michael Stein. Permanent Press, 176 pagers, $24.
	Dare to care Michael Stein, M.D., is a professor of medicine at Brown University and runs a large research laboratory. Yet throughout his college and med school years, he also wanted to be a writer. He hung out with writers; he married one (Hester Kaplan). And in 1995, he published his first novel, Probabilities. He’s since produced three more: White Lies (1999), The Lynching Tree (2001), and the just-published This Room Is Yours, recently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Stein, 44, grew up in New Jersey, moved to Providence 15 years ago, and is the father of two sons. But beyond those bare facts, any similarities between the narrator of This Room Is Yours and Stein are known only to the character and his author. The following is taken from a recent conversation with Stein. Q: Since the narrator/storyteller of this novel is a "teacher" and a "medical volunteer," and since the tone is so confiding, a reader can’t help but ask: "Does this book have any autobiographical sources?" A: As a writer, a father, and a son, I have always been interested in the parent-child relationship. Memories of our parents are like those last drops of water that remain on a child when he leaves the shower, the ones that never quite dry off. I think of This Room Is Yours as a book about the relationship of children and parents and about care-taking. Q: Have you done care-taking outside of the medical realm? A: Most of us has had some experience with taking care of others; I certainly have, in various shapes and forms. I tried to capture the challenges I’ve had care-taking, the constant sense that I was on the edge of collapse. Q: You’ve nailed that quite effectively in the son’s character, and it does indeed sound as if you’ve been there. A: Novels are always soul-searching instruments, and while the emotional core of this story is deeply personal, novels must always be a register of adventure and not merely a catalog of the contents of a writer’s memory. Q: Does the book draw upon experiences you’ve had as a medical professional? A: What you very quickly learn as a physician is that "life is trouble." Fortunately, that insight is the first building block, the sine qua non, of fiction. Q: What kinds of "trouble" did you want to get across? A: I don’t think of This Room Is Yours as a book about dementia or Alzheimer’s disease or old age. As I said, I think of it as a book about the relationship of children and parents and about care-taking. Care-giving teaches humility. And humility is a small, inward emotion, ideal for a certain kind of novel, one where a character, in this case my narrator, struggles with the finite rather than the infinite. The narrator of This Room Is Yours learns to accept the limits on life, and there is something heroic and admirable in that, I believe. Q: How did you come upon the structure of the "Reader’s Guide" chapters? A: I do try to play with the idea of the relationship of autobiography to fiction in the sections I call "Reader’s Guides." These pages, set amidst the flow of the story, are meant to capture what every reader and every writer thinks from time to time: "How much of this tale is drawn directly from the life?" I believe memory always has fictional elements, so a story about memory, about a woman losing her memory, seemed the perfect opportunity to explore this issue of "what’s made up?" Q: In fact, when you have the narrator ponder the nature of memory, several different times and in different ways, he’s actually asking in his own way what has he "made up" and what really happened. A: Fiction, like memory, is not tidy, at least it’s not in the fiction I like. Fiction should be rich in digression and deviation and indecision. The "Reader’s Guides" are meant to undermine certainty, the certainty of a straight-ahead story, and the dementia of the elderly parent here surely undermines certainty for her son. Fiction is not merely an exercise in remembering, it has a shape and a controlled effect, and the "Reader’s Guides" are meant to remind the reader of this in a complicating, but I hope clarifying way. — J.R.

Let me just say at the outset that Michael Stein’s This Room Is Yours is a tough book to read for many of us who’ve given care to elderly relatives or friends. It hits too close to the bone. And that, of course, is one of its sharpest accomplishments, its honesty about the welter of conflicting emotions that shimmer around the relationship of care-giver and care-receiver.

The title refers to a sign that the narrator sees taped to a door in a nursing home’s Alzheimer’s unit, put there ostensibly to remind the occupant where she lives. For the nameless narrator, whose mother is in the beginning phase of Alzheimer’s disease, that sign is a confirmation of his fears about her and about himself. When will she need such a reminder? And when may he?

Stein is very good at conveying all of those difficult feelings that crop up in an adult child who is caring for a parent with dementia, including that fear: Will this happen to me? But he’s onto more than the specifics of his two main characters’ situations; he’s also using the opportunity of describing the mental decline of someone with Alzheimer’s to question the very nature of memory itself, especially in connection with a parent-child relationship.

It’s obvious that childhood memories of our parents are colored by the emotional context in which those events took place. We may think of them as "the facts" of our lives, but in actuality, they are just our version of what happened. Stein’s narrator understands that from the outset, but what he hasn’t factored in is how much of the hurt he felt in his teen years by his mother’s abandonment still lingers in his reactions to her.

And that is his journey in this novel, as he comes to terms with who his mother is in the present, who he thought she was, in both the recent and the distant past, and who she had been that he knew nothing about (a bit of suspense in the novel). Almost imperceptibly, the narrator moves beyond the point where he got stuck emotionally when he was 14; he inches toward forgiveness.

Stein’s prose is deceptively simple in its ability to lure us into his story. The tone is at times conspiratorial, as if the narrator is making journal entries; at other times reflective, as the narrator/son tries to make sense of what is happening to him and to his mother. The incidents he relates are, for the most part, small, ordinary happenings, but Stein’s admirable craft is to zero in on the details, whether it’s the clothing of his mother’s lunchmates or the many collections she keeps in her refrigerator (tiny tubs of butter and grape jelly, packets of Sweet ’n’ Low, cookies wrapped in paper napkins).

The shortness of the chapters also contributes to that sense of very personal jottings by the narrator, as do his digressions, in the chapters headed "Reader’s Guide." These are usually addressed directly to the reader, and they are often analytical, either explaining the origins and medical manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease or ruminating on different definitions of memory and how it works. It struck me that these chapters are also the physician Stein peeking through the writer Stein, taking a step back and examining the patient, in this case the novel itself.

Those diversions not only contribute considerable heft to the novel, even as they poke fun at its form; they are also like rest stops in the face of the disease’s (and novel’s) steady progression, places to pull over and take stock of what’s happening. It’s in these chapters that Stein’s sardonic humor can be particularly stinging, while a droller wit seeps into the narrator’s regular voice.

Stein has juggled many things in this book. Along with getting readers to think about the lessons and rewards that accompany the challenges of care-giving, he has re-affirmed the significance of mending child-parent relationships and reminded us of the place that memory plays in all our lives — not just those who are forgetting. He has shown us a son in the role of care-giver for an elderly parent, when daughters or daughters-in-law are most often the ones we read about. And he has drawn an unforgettable picture of the feistiness and resilience of someone who is in the throes of losing who she is.

Despite what could be a somber topic, This Room Is Yours is a very readable book, with deft pacing and skillful variations in tone. That it leaves you walking through your own memories of child-parent interactions is testimony to its quiet power.