Academy Award-winning actor Marcia Gay Harden, who has captivated audiences with her performances in a myriad of films and television shows, joined "Salon Talks" to discuss the newest credential on her resume: author. Harden wrote her new memoir, "The Seasons of My Mother: A Memoir of Love, Family and Flowers", out May 1, over the past seven years inbetween shooting shows like the CBS drama "Code Black," in which she stars as Dr. Leanne Rorish, and the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movies. The book centers around her traveling with her mother during this time and the real and metaphorical journey of her mother's devastating Alzheimer's diagnosis.

"I think I was pissed off. That's why I started to write it," Harden told Salon's Alli Joseph. "There's nothing good about Alzheimer's. It just sucks. It's not the disease you can say you can make lemonade from lemons." It is always hard, Harden writes in the book, when "the children become the caregivers," but she finds joy and humor around her mother's illness, because, she said, one has to. The anger and powerlessness she has felt over the past 15 years, as she watched the mother she knew fade, is palpable. But, Harden says, she wants readers to know that despite her mother's memory disappearing, her mom's essence of love remains ever-present, no matter how much she fades away.