What do you do when the person you love is still there, but the person you knew is already gone? Woman of Valor is a memoir by Jeanne Simonoff, published September 2, 2026 by Redhawk Publications that explores this topic. It’s a slim book at 150 pages, and the second installment in a planned memoir trilogy, following Simonoff’s 2010 debut, Saving Myself: A Los Angeles Childhood. It tackles some heavy topics, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, while also just being a beautiful story of family, love, and aging.
The book opens with Simonoff, now in her seventies and living in Santa Fe, being visited by the spirit of her late grandmother “Bubbie,” who announces herself with scents of lavender talc or chocolate. Bubbie narrates fragments of the family’s history, such as their flight from Russia around 1909, their years in Omaha and Sioux City, and their eventual settling in Los Angeles. It’s an unusual way to open a memoir, but it immediately establishes the blend of the real and the spiritual that runs through the entire book.
From there the book moves chronologically through the early 1990s and into the 2000s, moving between Simonoff’s own memories and Bubbie’s ghostly interjections along the way. Uncle Dave’s decline comes first, followed by her father Leo’s, whose struggles include losing his driver’s license and a request he makes of Simonoff that leads to one of the book’s heaviest scenes. Each family member’s arc unfolds gradually, so I’ll leave the specifics for you to discover.
This is first and foremost a very personal, intimate read, and it touches on a lot of interesting subjects at once, such as Jewish identity and tradition, aging, and the cruelty of watching memory disappear in someone you love. It’s likewise an emotional story of caregiving, of daughters becoming parents to their own parents, and of a woman near the end of her own life looking back at all of it. Overall, it’s a book with real emotional weight behind every page.
The main theme of the book is dementia and memory, and the loss thereof, but Simonoff frames that loss less as an ending and more as a transformation. Memory doesn’t just vanish in these pages; it relocates, into scents, objects, prayers, and the people left behind who keep carrying it. That reframing is what keeps the book from reading as purely tragic, even as it never once looks away from how hard the losses actually were.
Beyond that central thread of illness, the book is layered with smaller, specific family details: Jewish ritual and prayer (Shabbat candles, sitting shiva), immigrant history, and warm, tactile memories. Snickers bars smuggled home from grocery runs. A menorah-shaped ring with diamonds passed down through the family. A sterling silver Kiddush cup that goes missing and is never recovered.
On the prose itself, Simonoff’s style shifts constantly between plain, almost transcript-like dialogue and more lyrical, imagistic writing, sometimes within the same page. I found this uneven in a way that felt purposeful rather than sloppy: the plainer passages read like she’s simply recording what happened, while the poetic ones are where she’s clearly processing it. Where the book is strongest, to me, is in its specificity: the smells, prayers, and objects that root the abstract subject of memory loss in something real.
On pacing, I found the dated-chapter format effective for a memoir like this. It reads like flipping through a journal, and the specificity of each date grounds you even as the emotional content gets heavier. Nonetheless, some may feel the interludes and poems occasionally interrupt momentum right when a chapter’s stakes are rising.
This might be intentional, mirroring how memory itself interrupts and resurfaces rather than flowing cleanly. But it does mean the read isn’t always a smooth, forward pull, and a reader looking for sustained narrative tension or a clear plot arc may struggle to find them.
The book’s boldest choice is probably making Bubbie a time-traveling narrator, and in my opinion it mostly pays off. It turns what could have been a grim, clinical account of a terrible disease into something closer to a séance, tender and even funny at times, like when Bubbie slips a bobby pin into Jeanne’s pocket as a “message” from her dead father. It never downplays how hard the actual caregiving years were, though.
Do I believe she’s really there? My answer is, Yes and No. The Yes: I believe she is real in my dream life. The No is how is that possible? I believe in the concept of a thin veil between the two worlds. I believe that at some points, this veil is lowered, and we get a sneak preview floating back and forth. It may be no more than the entertainment of the concept, but that’s not nothing.
One more thing I want to point out, and that I appreciated is that the book doesn’t try to offer easy comfort or tidy lessons about dementia. Simonoff resists the urge to wrap the experience in a neat moral, and that restraint is part of what makes the book feel poetic and honest rather than instructional. She’s not writing a guide for other caregivers so much as a record of what it actually felt like to be one, again and again, for much of her adult life.
In conclusion, Woman of Valor is a short and sweet book that will resonate with the right reader. The title is a phrase from the biblical Book of Proverbs, and in the memoir it refers both to Esther, who became Jeanne’s mother after her birth mother’s death, and to Jeanne herself, who faced her family’s dementia with the same strength. The book’s emotional honesty and compelling writing make it a highly affecting read, and its unconventional blend of prose, poetry, memory, and ghostly visitations will stick with you.
Final verdict: For fans of memoirs like The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke, Where the Light Gets In by Kimberly Williams-Paisley, or anyone who is interested in Jewish family memoirs, Woman of Valor is an enjoyable, resonant read well worth picking up.
