Palo Alto author Kathleen Canrinus' book "The Lady with the Crown: A Story of Resilience" is the memoir of two people: Canrinus and her mother, Dorothy.

The book explores their lives together over decades as they navigated the seismic changes brought by a car accident that left Dorothy with a traumatic brain injury and the author — a teenager at the time of the accident — trying to adapt, along with her father and brother, to a starkly different family order. The event flipped the expected dynamic between mother and daughter, with Canrinus helping her father to care for her mother, whose short- and long-term memory and ability to walk and communicate were impacted by the injury. She was in a coma for three months following the accident, and when she woke, she could no longer walk and had lost most of the mobility on one side of her body. Her speech was garbled, which meant she often had difficulty communicating with people, aside from family and friends who knew her speech patterns.

"The Lady with the Crown," published earlier this year, weaves together scenes from Canrinus' youth before her mother's injury through the 54 years that followed it, all the way to her mother's death at age 99.

Her mother became a focus of Canrinus' writing because she wanted to honor her and share her story.

"I thought she lived her life so well. 'Wonderful, wonderful' — she used to say that about almost everything: dinner, lunch, a ride, a visit — she found something to appreciate, and she told me all the time that she was lucky, which I didn't understand for a very long time," she said.

Canrinus grew up in Los Gatos, where roughly the first half of the memoir takes place, but much of the remaining story unfolds on the Peninsula. She has lived in Palo Alto's Barron Park neighborhood since 1981 and, except for a few years away in southern California, has been a Palo Alto resident since the 1960s. She and her husband, Don, raised their two daughters in Palo Alto. Following in the footsteps of her parents, who were both educators, Canrinus worked as a teacher at Addison, Ventura and Juana Briones elementary schools.

It was retirement that gave Canrinus a chance to bring her and her mother's story to the page. Drawn to both oil painting and writing after she retired, Canrinus said she briefly tried painting, taking up the same easel, paints and brushes that her father had enjoyed using during his own retirement, but writing won out.

"I wanted to study the craft of writing. I had a couple of stories that I wanted to put on paper. One of them is the chapter "Blindsided" in the book and another is about a hike I took in the Himalayas. I wanted to write those stories well, so I signed up for writing classes, and for the better part of 12 years, I worked on the craft," she said.

"I was writing stories about my mother, and about marriage and friendship and aging and hiking, and there was a very positive response to the mother stories. In fact, one of my classmates said to me, 'I like her better than I like you.' I took that as a compliment because I had written my mother — I had created her on the page."

These "mother stories" became the inspiration for "The Lady with the Crown." As her classmate found, Canrinus' portrait of her mother throughout the book is appealing and relatable: adventurous and fun-loving if sometimes impatient, with an irreverent sense of humor, a kind but no-nonsense nature, and an occasional penchant for cheating at cards.

"The book is funny in parts because my mother was funny — and uplifting. I hope that readers will enjoy meeting her. That said, I am not a believer in silver linings. This is not a book about them," Canrinus said.

The chapter "Blindsided" tells of the February 1960 car accident that injured Dorothy Canrinus — "the day everything changed in our lives," as Kathleen Canrinus describes it. It's a key chapter, and the first story that she wrote for class. Faced with an initial writing assignment about "My First Date," instead she chose to write about the day of the accident because she said that she felt she couldn't write anything else.

The piece set the tone for a memoir that's honest about the difficulties that Canrinus experienced — struggling with the pressures of juggling work, children and caring for a parent, or negotiating a succession of unhelpful caregivers — and sharing the gratitude and contentment of good times with her mother, from a chaotic but joyful trip to Italy to numerous card games, picnics in the car and time spent together just running errands.

"It is deeply personal," Canrinus said of the book. "Why not go for the deeply personal? I didn't want to write about it from a distance."

She is also open in writing about the guilt, fear, anger and frustration she experienced at various points in her life, as a teen grappling with her family's new situation and as an adult, with a family and career of her own, trying to meet the commitment of being the primary caregiver for her mother after her father died.

"I was never writing, really, as therapy, although I hold all those experiences a little lighter now that they're in story form and I've looked for patterns and meaning. It was hard to write the difficult parts but I thought they were essential," she said. "I thought it was essential to reveal my own shortcomings when I was not rising to my own best self or standards for best self — when I failed miserably, not only in taking care of her but in taking care of my children, shorting work, my husband."

Writing did reveal some surprises or greater perspective in some cases, Canrinus said, whether it was further insight into her teen years following the accident or the realization that her mother was still, in subtle ways, mothering her. For instance, Canrinus recalled realizing that her mother took pleasure in the fact that Canrinus enjoyed cooking for her, although she couldn't taste the food.

"I missed that I really did have a mother, even though I was in a parental role. There are things that she was showing me that are just so valuable, and I missed that for a while," she said.

Although aspects of trauma, loss and grief inform "The Lady with the Crown," its focus on the challenges and joys of relationships with family and friends, especially, of course, between Canrinus and her mother, make it overall a thoughtful story about life.

"My own takeaway from the way my mother lived her life is that if she can say, 'I'm very lucky,' given her unimaginable losses, I, who can do everything she was unable to do, can certainly look for things to appreciate and be grateful for. 'You're very lucky too,' she said to me. I'm lucky she was my mother. She was a great teacher," Canrinus said.

"The Lady with the Crown" is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and ePub and can be ordered at any independent bookstore, or purchased directly from the author. Canrinus is also available to participate in book clubs in person or virtually. Contact her at kcanrinus@gmail.com.