Melodies Of The Heart

This novella is included in the anthology 'The Forest of Time and Other Stories' published by Phoenix Pick. It was nominated for the Hugo Award.
From the Author's Commentary:
One of the most important qualities of fantastic literature is its realism.
That may sound like a contradiction, but the more fantastically improbable the subject, the more realistically it should be treated. Otherwise the suspension of disbelief becomes hanged by the neck until dead.
Oliver Sacks describes incontinent nostalgia in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a book I have mentioned already. Patients, some of whom had entirely forgotten their childhood, heard snatches of tunes and saw early scenes and felt emotions of poignancy and joy. I wondered how this might be treated as an SF theme.
I imagined an old woman telling her doctor about the music she hears. With each session, the music comes from earlier times. Eventually, from times too early to be possible, unless the woman is a lot older than she seems. An immortal? This is where a sense of realism kicked in.
Not immortal; just long-lived. (Besides, after Poul Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years, who can write another immortals story?) I checked the Book of Records: oldest authenticated human age was just shy of 121 years. So the woman, let's say she's two hundred years old. Something that, maybe, it could happen once in a couple hundred million lives. Some mutation is pressing her hold button. But she doesn't know it, because what she has not forgotten has become blurred by the mental distance.
Okay, so what was the story? Doctor listens to old woman hum tunes is not a story. Even doctor discovers old woman's age is not a story. Who is the doctor? Who is the woman? Why would it matter, to either one of them, how old she is?
Mae Holloway became real first. I knew from the start she was from the East Tennessee hills, remote enough in that era that she could grow old slowly among mind-yer-own-business neighbors, the nearest one a hoot and a holler away. My wife's ancestors came from there, so I had already done some research. Green Holloway's Civil War records are essentially those of her great-grandfather, who was with the 5th Tennessee, U.S. Volunteers. There were Holloways living in Blount Co. and a neighbor who was a free person of color. Another ancestor, up in Kentucky, was Greenberry Harris, a neighbor of the Lincoln family.
The most painful thing about living a long, long time is that everyone you love does not. And so Mae became detached, refusing to form close relationships.
Still no story, but a hint that the story must end with Mae forming a close relationship.
Mae is now dying. Conflict. The doctor wants to keep her from dying. Why? Because it's his job? Naah. I didn't want to write about right to die and why would she have to be two hundred years old for that? Realizing how long-lived she is, the doctor keeps her alive despite the pain to discover her secret? Naah. Too much mad-scientist melodrama. Fiction works best when both protagonist and antagonist have believable motives over which they can agonize.
When I thought of the progeria angle, everything fell into place. Paul Wilkes became real. I understood his motives, his unkind feelings toward the elderly, his relations with his wife and Consuela. Brenda was harder, but I finally understood her, too.
Doctor discovers old woman's age is not a story. But Paul Wilkes, tormented by his daughter's progeria, discovers that bitter, old Mae Holloway is two centuries old... now, that had possibilities.
Enough possibilities to put the story on the Hugo ballot, and to put it in Gardner Dozois's annual Year's Best collection, making this story the perfect companion bookend to The Forest of Time.