The Test

From American Book Award-winner Dorothy Bryant, comes this timeless story about caring for an aging parent. With complexity, bravery, and dry humor, The Test details the frustrating push and pull between Pat and her eighty-year-old father, who is attempting-for the third and last time-to pass the test to renew his driver’s license. Bryant’s unflinching gaze sees deep into the hearts of both parent and child, revealing the dramatic, awkward, and universal struggle each faces with aging, memory, and love. Trying to reconstruct memories of her childhood and of who her parents once were, Pat puzzles out the confabulations of family memory: how stories become accepted fact, how facts get twisted in stories, and how some perspectives are lost completely. In a deeply sensitive examination of one woman’s coping with the changes of aging, Bryant offers a rare and moving testimony.