“A moving story about a father and daughter, both artists who created something special out of imagination and love.  Ross Ward left us his magical world of Tinkertown.  And Tanya Ward Goodman has given us this beautiful book.” 

~ David Ebershoff, author of THE 19TH WIFE

Tanya Ward Goodman’s father painted carnival signs for a living and raised his family in Tinkertown Museum, a roadside attraction in rural New Mexico whose walls were made of beer bottles.  When he was diagnosed in his 50s with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, Goodman gave up her writing career and a new love in Los Angeles to move back home, only to become more and more unmoored as her father’s memory grew hazy.  Being her father’s daughter was what she did best; when he inevitably forgot her name, who would she be?  Her memoir, LEAVING TINKERTOWN, is an account both humorous and heart-wrenching of the ways that loss reshaped her eccentric family and propelled her to realize that her place in the world lay outside “the museum.”

“Leaving Tinkertown” is the winner of the 2014 Sarton Memoir Prize, The 2014 New Mexico Arizona Book Award for “Best New Book,” “Best NM Biography” and “Best Book” and the New Mexico Presswomens’ Association 2015 “Zia Book Award.” And has been named by the American Society on Aging as “One of Eleven Caregiving Memoirs That Get it Right.”

“Leaving Tinkertown teaches us about devotion, loyalty and inheritance, and all their profoundest truths.”

  ~ Vicki Forman, author of This Lovely Life, winner of the PEN Center Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize

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