The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was keep. This started out as a delete consensus, but it seems like Cunard's arguments convinced folks, and it now reads more like a keep consensus. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:52, 9 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t believe this subject passes WP:AUTHOR. I see a couple of book reviews and interviews, nothing more. Mccapra (talk) 05:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom, didn't find enough RS. Caro7200 (talk) 12:47, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Delete The article lacks any secondary sources at all. This is a relic of the pre-2006 era when we had no notability requirements at all.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:56, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Evans, Christopher. (1985-09-08). "The cruelest of incurable diseases" (pages 1, 2, and 3). Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Archived from the original (pages 1, 2, and 3) on 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-04-06. – via Newspapers.com.
Madigan, Nick. (1985-08-29). "Alzheimer's Disease: Madness Without Method" (pages 1 and 2). The Palm Beach Post. Archived from the original (pages 1 and 2) on 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-04-06. – via Newspapers.com.
"Marion Roach". Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Gale. 2012-12-07. Archived from the original on 2020-04-05. Retrieved 2020-04-05.
The article notes:
Born April 7, 1956, in Queens, NY; daughter of James Pilkington (a sportswriter) and Allene (a teacher) Roach; married Rex Smith (a newspaper editor); children: one daughter. Education: St. Lawrence University, B.A. (cum laude), 1977.
The article notes:
New York Times, New York, NY, copy person, 1977-78, news clerk, 1978-80, news assistant, 1980-83; National Public Radio, All Things Considered commentator; Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY, writing instructor; member of board of directors of Alzheimer's Resource Center.
The article notes:
In Marion Roach Smith's first book, Another Name for Madness, she relives the decline of her talented and relatively young mother, Allene, from Alzheimer's disease, and the impact it had on Roach Smith and the rest of the family before Allene was finally placed in a nursing home. ...
Roach Smith later shared what she knows about writing memoirs in The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing--and Life. The author at the time had long been teaching courses in memoir writing, and this book distills her wisdom about working in the form. She distinguishes between memoir and autobiography: An autobiography deals with essentially an entire life, but a memoir deals with a much more bounded portion of a person's life, perhaps even just a day or an hour. The book emphasizes such tried-and-true principles of writing as "write what you know" and "show, don't tell." One significant piece of advice the author provides budding memoirists is not to write about themselves but rather to write about a theme that is bigger than the self. Thus, she proposes that a memoirist adopt an "algorithm" such as the following: "This is an (x) and the illustration is ( y). In other words, the x is what the story is at its heart, while the y is the specific illustration about which the memoirist will write." Another key piece of advice Roach Smith offers is to avoid topics that are too big. She thus urges her students and readers to start small and to keep matters concrete. Additionally, she urges memoirists to keep their focus on the word or image that captures the essence of their experience.
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Roach Smith collaborated with Michael Baden, a former New York City chief medical examiner, in writing Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers.
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Roach Smith, a redhead herself, is the author of Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair, in which she writes that red hair has often been viewed with suspicion and linked with witchcraft, eroticism, and evil.
It is always rather difficult to pinpoint when these things begin, but for Marion Roach, the onset of the nightmare was as clearly defined as anything can possibly be.
It started that October morning in 1979 when her mother, teeth-clenched, hurled four of the family's seven healthy cats into the car, drove them to the vet and had them killed.
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Marion Roach, her elder sister, Margaret, and their mother's doctor all believe that Allene Roach will be dead within a year.
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To explain how, Marion Roach, a 29-year-old former staff writer for the New York Times, has written Another Name for Madness (Houghton Mifflin, $14.95), a stark and disturbing chronicle of her mother's desperate degeneration.
This new book is the outgrowth of an article she wrote for The Times' Sunday magazine in 1983, a piece that generated 500 letters and 400 phone calls, put Marion Roach on the Today Show and got her called to Washington to testify before the House Subcommittee on Aging.
Evans, Christopher. (1985-09-08). "The cruelest of incurable diseases" (pages 1, 2, and 3). Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Archived from the original (pages 1, 2, and 3) on 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-04-06. – via Newspapers.com.
The article notes:
Yet Alzheimer's was not considered the disease of the century six year ago, when Marion Roach, then 23, realized her active 51-year-old mother was "losing her mind in handfuls."
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Author of a new book, Another Name for Madness (Houghton Mifflin, $14.95), Marion Roach is careful to point out that her first hardbound publishing effort, 241 pages, is not entirely about Alzheimer's disease. It is not, she said in a Dallas interview, a medical treatise or "how-to" legal handbook.
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Marion Roach, like her parents a journalist who had worked for the New York Times, set out to find out everything she could about Alzheimer's, a malady Time magazine last year called "a slow death of the mind" and perhaps "the cruelest" of incurable diseases.
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In 1983, Marion Roach wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the agony surrounding her mother's experience, a project that led to Another Name for Madness.
Although the book is hardly preachy or filled with iron-clad advice, it should go far in allaying some widely held misconceptions.
Another Name for Madness is about an Alzheimer's family. In telling her story, Marion Roach does not gloss over her very human reactions from the onset of her widowed mother's disease to the present. Her actions were not heroic. The picture she paints of herself is often one of confusion and indecision.
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Marion and her mother lived together in a New York apartment, enjoying a relationship more like that of close friends than mother and daughter. But although her mother was only 50 and still a beautiful woman, the denial that something was seriously wrong was difficult to continue. ...
Marion, urged by her sister who lived in California, took her mother to a nuerologist. From that moment on, she would become an expert on the subject of Alzheimer's disease by virtue of the foremost teacher of all — firsthand experience.
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The frustration of constantly dealing with the erratic, often bizarre behavior was taking its toil. Marion developed an ulcer and had sessions with a psychiatrist to get her through the stressful days, but she had sobered enough to write an article about her experiences for the New York Times Magazine. She has since testified in Congress before the House Subcommittee on Aging to plead for help in changing the insurance system that classifies Alzheimer's disease as a custodial rather than a medical problem.
For Marion Roach, it all started with a sideways--or rather an upward--glance. Footloose in Europe at 25, gazing up at ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the first time, she noticed something odd. The innocent, pre-apple Eve was blond, whereas the Eve being kicked out of the Garden of Eden was wearing nothing but her long red hair.
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It took several years and miles of travel for Roach's curious concern to grow to book length. "The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair" (Bloomsbury) was released earlier this month. It's one of the most extensive serious inquiries to date on what it means to be a redhead.
...
In Roach's case, the spark of inspiration for her book came in 2002 in the form of a scientific study she read in a medical journal.
Madigan, Nick. (1985-08-29). "Alzheimer's Disease: Madness Without Method" (pages 1 and 2). The Palm Beach Post. Archived from the original (pages 1 and 2) on 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-04-06. – via Newspapers.com.
The article notes:
Listening in a radio studio was a young woman who could empathize. Marion Roach, a 29-year-old New York writer, has purged some of the pain of her mother's harrowing six-year battle with Alzheimer's disease by writing a book about it. In Another Name for Madness, Allene Roach makes what her daughter calls the "unbearably sad" transition from a radiant, talented former journalist who taught preschool children and loved sailing to a witless, confused woman who, at 56, is virtually speechless and completely unable ot take care of herself.
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Miss Roach, who had never heard of the disease before her family's tragey and is now one of its most vocal experts, said that while she could not have killed her mother, "I understand the frustration the families go through."
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The author, in a brief visit to Miami, field comments from listeners to a call-in radio show who sought solace from a person with experiences similar to their own.
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Neil Rogers, the host of the radio show, asked his guest whether anything could have helped Roswell Gilbert's wife. Nothing, Miss Roach said.
Marion Roach, a writer based in upstate New York, is a member of the tribe. Her red hair is the first thing she mentions when describing herself. In The Roots of Desire she ruminates about red hair and our ideas about it. Part history, part science, part memoir, the book is a weaving, wandering thing, personal and essayistic. It's underdeveloped in places, and in places simply hard to follow. But it's richly salted with fascinating cultural lore, and an engaging read whether you're a carrot-top or not.
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Roach is at her best when harvesting historical and cultural tidbits and spicing them with her own searching reflections. Less successful are her extended discussions of the genetics of redheadedness. There's a knack to translating scientific principles into terms comprehensible to lay readers, and Roach apparently doesn't have it.
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She also throws in narratives of her field research. For example, having always heard that witches tend to be redheads she visits a witch camp in Vermont. Later she relates a trip to Great Britain in search of information about her redheaded ancestors. Thin and sketchy, these narrative segments are awkwardly integrated into the rest of the book.
That said, there's much to like about The Roots of Desire, particularly Roach's infectious joy in being a redhead, in the feeling of power it conveys.
Writing, as she argues in her new book "The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life," is hard work. ...
Yet in a recent telephone interview Roach Smith, who is the wife of Times Union editor Rex Smith, said she believes "everybody should write." Not everyone, she adds, needs to aspire to write for publication. Many people may have smaller-scale, more personal goals: to give a husband the 50th anniversary gift of an essay on why he is loved, to leave children an account of their ancestors' emigration or self-discovery.
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Roach Smith is a former staff writer with The New York Times and has served as a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." She writes and records daily and weekly spots on Martha Stewart Living Radio. She is the author of "The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair" (2005) and co-author, with forensic pathologist Michael Baden, of "Dead Reckoning" (2001). She has taught memoir writing at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy since 1998 ("I think I figured out the other day that I'd had 800 students so far go through the class").
She spoke from the home in Troy she shares with her husband and their 15-year-old daughter.
"People started crafting and scrapbooking," says Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life. "The craft aisles in Michael's would get bigger every day. I would go there with my husband and say, 'Look! These people are writing memoirs!'"
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Since 1998, Smith has been teaching a class called "Writing What You Know" in upstate New York. It focuses on memoir, which captures a scene or theme from a life and is not to be confused with autobiography, which tackles an entire life.
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The Memoir Project, released this month by Grand Central Publishing, is packed with Smith's memories and how she transformed them into words. Details matter, she insists. What you take away from an experience - the image or phrase or feeling that stays with you - holds the soul of your story.
It is apparent from the very first pages that the author very much needed to write this book. As a journalist as well as a concerned daughter, Roach seems to pour her heart out as the pages unfold. Her sadness, anger and relief can all be sensed as she tells of the effects of her mother's disease on her life and her sister's life.
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The book is well worth reading because of the information it provides on the mystery of Alzheimer's disease from a very personal perspective. It is both sad and happy to read and well worth the time.
And nowadays, everybody seems to want to write about their life. But too often that telling gets bogged down with excess baggage and loses direction. Marion Roach Smith wants to change that with her new book, "The Memoir Project - A Thoroughly Non-Stardardized Text for Writing & Life."
Ms. Roach Smith is a St. Lawrence University trustee who lives and teaches writing in Troy. She's an alumni of the SLU class of 1977 and a former staff member of the New York Times and is a contributor of essays to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Her previous books are "The Roots of Desire - The Myth, Meaning and Power of Red Hair" and "Another Name for Madness," which drew on her experiences as her mother battled Alzheimer's disease.
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Ms. Roach Smith teaches writing at a variety of venues. Her weekly memoir classes at The Arts Center of the Capital Region concentrate on short-form memoir. Her classes instruct how to write "with purpose." She said many students tell her they want to write their memoirs.
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Ms. Roach Smith has experience in what to leave in and out of a memoir. In 1983, while working as a news clerk for the New York Times, she pitched a story idea to an editor about a little-known disease. In that same year, the magazine published her story "Another Name for Madness."
Marion Roach says the scariest moment of her life was going to her first autopsy. "When I was driving to the autopsy I thought I had arthritis - my hands hurt so much from gripping the steering wheel," Ms. Roach said. "In the beginning I was in a chair in a corner of the room. I wanted to be as far away as possible."
But for Ms. Roach, a 1977 graduate of St. Lawrence University and a member of the school's Board of Trustees, overcoming her fears was a necessary step for her to take in writing about forensic science in "Dead Reckoning." The book was co-written by famed medical examiner Michael Baden.
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Ms. Roach, Troy, besides being an author, is also a nationally known spokesperson on Alzheimer's disease. In 1985 she wrote the book "Another Name for Madness," the emotional story of her mother's suffering with the disease. The book was among the first to bring public attention to Alzheimer's and won wide acclaim, eventually leading to the establishment of a mayoral conference on the disease.
Comment:Teblick (talk·contribs) has done significant work on sourcing and expanding the article. Thank you for your improvements! Cunard (talk) 03:20, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. There are enough published reviews of enough of her books for WP:AUTHOR. I just added two more, for Dead Reckoning, to the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:30, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Keep: Now adequately sourced.--Ipigott (talk) 05:54, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.