How Lulu Lost Her Mind
By: Rachel Gibson / Narrated By: Stephanie Einstein
Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
A few chuckles, some unexpected depth… -PLUS- dude! just read that I dodged a bullet!!!
Okay so, like, I HAD to hit reviews over on Audible cuz I was wondering about Stephanie Einstein’s narration. It’s like this, I was just lolling around, minding m’ own business, and suddenly I’d be totally taken out of the story because Einstein would mispronounce something as basic as “cannula” or would switch “epitaph” to “epithet” which altogether caused some little Boooos! AND, the main part of this story takes place in Louisiana, with good-natured and boisterous Cajun folk. Soooo, how did Einstein do with her Southern accent, with her Cajun accent. I’m gonna cut her some slack on the Cajun because my gosh! that’s probably a tough one. One of my closest friends is all dignified, urbane and sophisticated and all that, but give her a couple of beers/glasses of wine/margaritas? Oh wow: You’ve just let out her Inner Cajun (She’s from Louisiana, natch. She by NO MEANS hides her Cajun roots, but it’s a GAS! when she’s knocked back a few, gets opinionated, and the Cajun slang and little terms of endearment come out!). Anyhoo, how’d Einstein do? this reviewer was wondering.
Uhm, not so well. Apparently her accents were atrocious.
So there’s that…
Still, How Lulu Lost Her Mind is a rather touching story of a mother/daughter relationship as mother Patricia slips deeper into her Alzheimer’s. So see, there’s some serious material here and the inevitability of decline and imminent death, yes. So Einstein did very well as Patricia slipped in and out of her moods, as she lost thoughts and words, as her world slipped away. And Einstein also did fairly well with our heroine Lou Ann as she handled her own worries, fears, regrets. Her hopes in the face of dwindling days and the upcoming loss. Further, there’s a bit of a twist in Patricia’s own hopes for herself, her own attempts to have a say in her demise (Which opens with a really, really sweet shopping trip to find a coffin she’d LOVE to spend the rest of time in…) that Einstein manages: The terror, the anger, the eventual acceptance… which was very well done.
But where I read those reviews that Booo!(ed) the accents? I ALSO found plenty of Boooo!s that apprised me of the fact that author Rachel Gibson is USUALLY known for just writing steeeeeamy romances. I mean, good cow, man! That woulda KILLED me! I haaaate toes curling in morbid embarrassment!
This story, however, has relatively little romance, no steam whatsoever. So >PHEW< and Thank Good Golly GOSH!
Instead, we open with Lou Ann as the famed Lulu who offers dating and relationship advice being dragged from the empire she controls. Mom is getting chucked outta yet aNOTHer memory care facility for getting caught spooning with a comatose fellow patient. It was vaaaastly unfortunate as the gentleman’s wife and kids and itty bitty grandkids found the pair like this. Patricia is OUT, and Lou Ann has to pull back a wee bit on the day to day running of Lulu Incorporated. And when Patricia adamantly howls to be taken to Louisiana to live out her days on the Sutton family estate (A rundown manor that to Patricia means Home, to Lou Ann shrieks MONEY PIT!), it’s off to Louisiana with the highest of hopes… and Lindsey—a young woman who might be, kinda sorta, on the run from something—as companion and nursing care.
Introduce Simon, the House Doctor, to restore the old home, and yup, we have the eventual love interest.
Theirs is a slow, slow, slooow relationship being built. It starts with animosity as this well-heeled city gal brings her Better Than Thou ideas, and it develops into a bit of a friendship. As Patricia often says, “I have a passionate nature,” so do we see that Simon is just THE guy to help her when she’s ornery as all get-out. And Lou Ann? Well, as the unbearably humid and hot weather, the biting insects take their toll, as she learns that every. single. heel WILL get stuck in the loamy earth and WILL snap off? She starts to realize that Hey, maybe jean cutoffs and kitschy souvenir shop T-shirts and sneakers are just the thing. And a chuckle-inducing run-in with a woman who shouldn’t, like never!, be allowed to wield a pair of scissors has her long curly hair lopped off to a more suitable bob.
Lou Ann? She’s changing. And as she hopes desperately to have more time with her mom, to make peace with a past where she was always uprooted as Patricia’s passionate nature had their lives changing for the Man Du Jour, Lou Ann starts soon discovering that acceptance is the only way to relax, to live. Even as Patricia’s condition deteriorates, as profanity hilariously laces each and every sentence of her speech. Add the secret Lindsey’s been living with, an obnoxious parrot who torments the women but who whistles appreciatively at Patricia, and this book was a fairly worthy li’l charmer.
Unfortunately abrupt ending notwithstanding, most of the story is woven together fairly seamlessly, and tho I can offer here that my own family’s journey through a loved one’s dementia was nowhere near as adorable as what is crafted here, I felt the moods swings, the sundowning, the fraught emotional states were pretty near accurate and inspired some memories. When Gibson chucked in that twist, and when she wrote a fairly intense and emotionally evocative denouement, I appreciated the depth, and yeh yeh yeh, a lump in m’ throat.
And when she refrained from adding apparently standard steaminess and spice?
Ohhhh, phew! phew! phew!
PHEW!!!
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