Presents the stories of young people who care for family members with difficult medical conditions.

"Walter Schmidt has lived his whole life within the narrow, 'comfortable' confines of traditional gender roles: he has made it to retirement without learning how to fry an egg or use a vacuum cleaner. After all, he could always count on his wife, Barbara. But when one morning she can't get up from bed anymore, everything changes. With biting humor and great warmth, Alina Bronsky writes about how Walter, nearing the end of his life, is suddenly forced...

"Linda Abbit, founder of Tender Loving Eldercare and a veteran of the caregiving industry, shares her advice on taking care of an older parent or loved one and how to handle everything that goes along with this dramatic life change. Being a caregiver can be a difficult role. It requires patience, tenderness, selflessness, and hard work. Providing care for someone, whether it's a parent, a loved one, or as a professional requires a high level of self-love...

"In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers...

"Born twenty years apart, sisters Adele and Justine have never been close--but they do love each other. When Addie dropped out of university to care for their ailing parents, Justine, a successful lawyer, covered the expenses. Now that their parents are gone, the future has changed dramatically for both women. Worn down by the pressures of caregiving, Addie doesn't know how to live for herself. And Justine's success has come at the price of her marriage,...

"When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman delivers a deeply humane and inspiring story of his life in medicine and his marriage to Joan, and he describes...

“There’s heartbreak, there’s joy, there are parts where you cry—and it’s very high quality writing. Well done!”
— Margaret Atwood

“Unpretentious and affecting, with characters to remember and themes that linger and resound.”
— Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Ten-Year Nap

Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault wrings

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"I yelled at the kids again--and feel so ashamed." "I barely have time to shower, let alone exercise; no wonder I'm so out of shape." "I'm just not the dad I hoped I would be." Parenting is hard. That's why self-compassion is so important. In this empathic resource, mindfulness expert and psychologist Susan M. Pollak helps you let go of constant self-judgment and treat yourself with the same kindness and caring you strive to offer your kids. Simple...

"What happens when your life is a rom-com ... but you don't even believe in true love? Chloe Sanderson is an optimist, and not because her life is easy. As the sole caregiver for her father, who has early onset Alzheimer's, she's pretty much responsible for everything. She has no time--or interest--in getting swept up in some dazzling romance. Not like her best friend Annie, who literally wrote a rom-com that's about to premiere in theaters across...

"Every family has its fault lines, and when Maggie gets a call from the ER in Maryland where her older sister lives, the cracks start to appear. Ginny, her sugar-loving and diabetic older sister with intellectual disabilities, has overdosed on strawberry Jell-O. Maggie knows Ginny really can’t live on her own, so she brings her sister and her occasionally vicious dog to live near her in upstate New York. Their other sister, Betsy, is against the...