What to Remember When You Are Forgetting: How to Live and Thrive with Memory Loss, Alzheimer's, and Other Dementias

Media darling and director of Memory and Healthy Aging at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Zaldy Tan's What to Remember When You Are Forgetting shares the definitive guide to thriving with dementia for the recently diagnosed and their caregivers.

What if a dementia diagnosis could be an invitation to live? What if the first phase of the disease could be a catalyst to embrace a long-forgotten dream? Or to finally resolve a festering family conflict? Or to make new friends and create new, cherished memories?

Renowned memory and Alzheimer's disease specialist, researcher, educator, and author Dr. Zaldy Tan, the Harvard-trained director of the Cedars-Sinai Memory and Healthy Aging Program, shares the definitive guide to thriving with dementia.

On these pages, you'll meet patients like Angela, who had worked as a singer in a Hollywood lounge before her children were born and dreamed of stardom. Instead, Angela put her dreams aside to raise her family. But after her diagnosis of early-onset dementia, instead of shutting down or continuing to prioritize others over herself, Angela embraced her career anew and traveled the country performing with a local singing group. You'll also meet Marcel, who considered Alzheimer's as a wake-up call to recalibrate his life priorities, and Mary-Louise, who didn't have family nearby to rely on but found an advocate in a new friend she met in a writing group.

With an incredibly thorough and deeply comforting approach, Dr. Tan tackles everything from how to have a conversation with a person experiencing early memory loss, to how to prepare for an initial assessment for Alzheimer's, and what accommodations and interventions are needed for every stage and type of dementia. He delves into the surprisingly hopeful research on new treatment and caregiving resources everyone should know, and reveals how other families and remarkable individuals he's treated over the years have handled both difficult challenges and incredible triumphs after diagnosis.

Author: Zaldy Tan
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 09/15/2026
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.29h x 6.36w x 1.16d
ISBN: 9781668093771


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2026 pg. 76
Publishers Weekly 08/03/2026
Booklist 08/01/2026

About the Author
Dr. Zaldy Tan is the Director of the Memory & Healthy Aging Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, ranked by the US News and World Report in 2024 as the best hospital on the US West Coast and among the top hospitals in the country. He holds the Carmen & Louis Warschaw Endowed Chair in Neurology and is a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Tan was the founding director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Tan performs aging and dementia research that has been covered by The New York Times, Time, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribute, Reuters, ABC News, and NBC News. He regularly speaks at major national and international conferences and is the author of Age-Proof Your Mind and What to Remember When You Are Forgetting.