When her husband, a physician, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of fifty, Renée Brown Harmon’s life threatened to capsize in the waves. She stayed afloat by learning to lean on friends and family and by relying on her devotion to her husband and her two young daughters. Renée, also a physician, chronicles the eight years of her husband’s illness in her book, Surfing the Waves of Alzheimer’s: Principles of Caregiving That Kept Me Upright. Drawing on principles she garnered along the way, she uses the structure of memoir to tell her and her husband’s story. Each chapter ends with a discussion of one of the principles Renée learned, and offers practices which readers may use to develop their own plan to bring greater balance to their roles as caregivers.