She was losing her mother…one memory at a time.
Years earlier, Andrea Hogan's mother walked the Camino de Santiago, capturing every step in a journal. Now, as Alzheimer's begins to steal those memories away, Andrea makes a bold decision.
She will walk the same 500-mile journey before it's too late.
What begins as a physical pilgrimage becomes something far more intimate. A daughter's attempt to reconnect with the woman she's slowly losing, and to understand who she is becoming in the process.
Along the road, Andrea retraces her mother's footsteps through villages and valleys, grief and laughter, memory and forgetting. With each mile, she uncovers fragments of the past-and pieces of herself she didn't know were missing.
The Closest Thing to Magic is a deeply moving memoir about:
- Loving someone through Alzheimer's
- The invisible weight of caregiving
- And the fragile, powerful ways we hold on to each other
For readers of Still Alice and When Breath Becomes Air, this is a story about what we lose…and what we find along the way.
