dementia Archives - Ann Hedreen, Writer Teacher Filmmaker

Emotional Cardio

Ann Hedreen2025-09-22T06:12:31-07:00Categories: arts, brain, Creative, creative aging, dementia, family, featured posts, journalism, memoir, Uncategorized, writing|Tags: AI, Alzheimer's, dementia, Richard Flanagan, She Writes Press, Vauhini Vara|

“Some stories punch you right in the gut, then hand you a tissue and say, good luck, kid. That’s what Her Beautiful Brain feels like,” began the email that landed in my inbox as my husband and I were making dinner. The writer of the email went on to summarize Her Beautiful Brain, my memoir which was published eleven years ago, using lavish phrases like, “the way you weave copper mines, Seattle classrooms, Haiti, and a geropsychiatric ward into one narrative… that’s not just writing, that’s emotional cardio.” (Heart emoji, bicep emoji). Is that a compliment? I think so. And what writer doesn’t enjoy receiving compliments from a stranger on a random Thursday evening after a long day? What writer isn’t touched to learn that her book is still reaching people, more than a decade after its publication date? However. A human person did not write this email. AI wrote this email. And I happened to receive it exactly four days after my publisher alerted her authors that many of us may be eligible to join the class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, one of the AI companies that allegedly pirated hundreds of thousands of books to train its large language model (LLM). A $1.5 billion dollar settlement had just been reached. We might all receive a payout of about three thousand dollars. She sent us a link, so we could confirm whether our books were pirated by LibGen (Library Genesis), the source allegedly used by Anthropic. Her Beautiful Brain popped right up. There were other parameters: published [...]

Sixty-six

“Good evening,” said a silver-haired woman in creamy linen, as she floated past me with her dapper husband towards the veranda of the El Mirador restaurant. They had a dinner reservation; several waiters hurried to greet and seat them. Another waiter, just as gracious, seated my husband and me with the slightly reduced amount of pomp accorded to the drinks-only crowd. But every table at El Mirador was positioned to take in the show: sunset over the Pacific Ocean, high above the curvaceous Baja coast, backed by a chorus line of frilly clouds and kicked off by a surprise opening act: one spouting whale. We sipped our drinks and savored our appetizer, a burrata and roasted tomato mélange almost too pretty to eat. We snapped photos, along with everyone else, and marveled that this elegant place existed, at the end of a dusty, bumpy, unpaved road. Sunset. How we humans love it! The young woman in satin pants and an off-the-shoulder, pink maribou sweater, the mom in shorts with a wiggly seven-year-old, the glamorous older couple, the table full of young men who looked like they might’ve flown in that day from Silicon Valley. We gasp at the sun’s grand finale, we toast it, we take photos and then sigh that they don’t do it justice. And yet: if our lives were a day, sunset is not where we would choose to be. And yet: wouldn’t you rather dwell in the sunset, than go right from noon to midnight? Am I really embarking on “an old [...]