A daughter. A diagnosis. A decade of holding on.

In 2015, after years of hospitalizations, conspiracy theories, and a knife pulled on my father, my mother was finally diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia — a disease that destroys the brain's capacity for empathy, impulse control, and social behavior.

The diagnosis reframed everything. The jobs she couldn't keep. The moods we called "fragile" because we were a good Southern family and didn't call things what they were. The violence my sisters and I grew up inside and never named.

The Wrong Pool braids a present-day crisis — extracting my mother from a Florida psychiatric ward and flying her across the country — with three decades of backstory that the diagnosis forces me to reread. It is about undiagnosed mental illness in a family that won't acknowledge there is a problem, about the daughter who ran the farthest and got pulled back the hardest, and about the question every caregiver knows: how do you grieve someone who is still alive?

"She was brilliant, funny, stubborn, impossible, and loving. And even now, when people tell me I have her smile, I know exactly what they mean."

Over 11 million Americans provide unpaid care for someone with dementia. This book is for them — and for anyone who has wondered whether the hardest person in their family was suffering more than anyone knew.