Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Karetta Hubbard
Fuze Publishing
fuzepublishing@gmail.com

Entering the Blue Stone
A Memoir, by Molly Best Tinsley

What happens when one's larger-than-life military parents--disciplined, distinguished, exacting--begin sliding out of control? The General struggles to maintain his invulnerable façade against Parkinson's disease; his lovely wife manifests a bizarre dementia. Their three grown children, desperate to save the situation, convince themselves of the perfect solution: an upscale retirement community. But as soon as their parents have been resettled within its walls, the many imperfections of its system of care begin to appear.

Charting the line between comedy and pathos, Molly Best Tinsley’s memoir, Entering the Blue Stone (Fuze Publishing, May, 2012), dissects the chaos at the end of life and discovers what shines beneath: family bonds, the dignity of even an unsound mind, and the endurance of the heart.

Entering the Blue Stone asks us to take a skeptical look at our need to spin heroic narratives with happy endings. It suggests letting go of our persistent orientation to the future in order to appreciate what is here and now. Rather than taking a how-to approach to the increasingly common experience of caring for diminished parents, it offers a unique perspective on this challenge and weaves a very special form of support. It would make a splendid, thought-provoking choice for many book groups.

Air Force brat Molly Best Tinsley taught on the civilian faculty at the United States Naval Academy for twenty years and is the institution’s first professor emerita. Author of My Life with Darwin (Houghton Mifflin) and Throwing Knives (Ohio State University Press), she also co-authored Satan’s Chamber (Fuze Publishing) and the textbook, The Creative Process (St. Martin’s). Her fiction has earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sandstone Prize, and the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been read and produced nationwide. She lives in Oregon, where she divides her time between Ashland and Portland.