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Mummy’s Little Helper: The Heartrending True Story of a Young Girl Secretly Caring for Her Severely Disabled Mother
Casey Watson · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
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Joyce Farmer · 200 pages
Chronicles the final years of Lars and Rachel's lives, their relationship with one another and with their daughter, and how they cope with the emotional fragility of the most taxing time in their lives.
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
Madeleine L'Engle · 245 pages
The author describes the senility and death of her ninety-year-old mother and her own concomitant emotions and frustrations.
Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me
Sarah Leavitt · 130 pages
Home is Burning
Dan Marshall · 304 pages
"For the Marshalls, laughter is the best medicine. Especially when combined with alcohol, pain pills, excessive cursing, sexual escapades, actual medicine, and more alcohol. Meet Dan Marshall. 25, good job, great girlfriend, and living the dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until his mother calls. And he ignores it, as you usually do when Mom calls. Then she calls again.
Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer's
Andrea Gillies · 323 pages
'Keeper' is a very humane and honest exploration of living with Alzheimer's, giving an illuminating account of the disease itself. Gillies tells about the time she and her family spent living with someone with dementia, in a big Victorian house in the far, far north of Scotland.
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast · 228 pages
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderl
Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
John Bayley · 304 pages
In this memoir, Bayley describes the life he shared with his wife, Iris Murdoch, afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. He explains how he coped emotionally and practically with the illness that beset the woman he loved and cherished.
Losing Mum and Pup
Christopher Buckley · 251 pages
In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Christopher Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York's most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relationship was close and complicated. Writes Buckley: "They were not - with respect to every oth
Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen
Jane Hawking · 483 pages
The wife of the reknowned British physicist describes their courtship and marriage, her years caring for his physical needs, his rise to prominence as a scientist and world celebrity, their bitter divorce, and later reconciliation. Stephen Hawking's first wife, Jane, relates the inside story of their marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of a mo
Patrimony
Philip Roth · 240 pages
In a moving elegy, one of America's most powerful writers recreates his father's ordeal as, suffering from a brain tumor, he battles with the ignominy and helplessness of old age.
The Middle Place
Kelly Corrigan · 272 pages
The thing you need to know about me is that I am George Corrigans daughter, his only daughter. So begins this beautifully written memoir, in which Kelly Corrigan intertwines her own story with that of her larger-than-life, Irish-American, born-salesman fathers, and illustrates both an unbelievably powerful and healing father/daughter relationship and the unbreakable bonds of family. Writing with c
Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
Katy Butler · 322 pages
"An exquisitely written, expertly reported memoir and expose; of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care based on the author's acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece. This is the story of one daughter's struggle to allow her parents the peaceful, natural deaths they wanted and to investigate the larger forces in medicine that stood in the way. When doctor
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
Michelle Zauner · 256 pages
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her gra
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers · 426 pages
From Wikipedia: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ISBN 0-330-48455-9) is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents. The book was an enormous commercial and critical success, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a final
The End of Your Life Book Club
Will Schwalbe · 344 pages
This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a "book club" that brings them together as the mother faces an advanced form of pancreatic cancer. The result is a profoundly moving tale of loss that is also a joyful, and often humorous, celebration of life.
The Old King in His Exile
Arno Geiger · 224 pages
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande · 283 pages
From surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine—and lives. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should. Through eye-opening research
The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit · 259 pages
A companion to "A Field Guide for Getting Lost" explores the ways that people construct lives from stories and connect to each other through empathy, narrative, and imagination, sharing anecdotes about historical figures and members of the author's own family.
Mother Daughter Me
Katie Hafner · 286 pages
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's memoir of the year she and her mother Helen spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Katie urged Helen, set in her ways at 77, to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie's teenage daughter. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and h
The End of Eve
Ariel Gore · 239 pages
At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she's always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life's happy endings don't always last. If it's not one thing, after all, it's your mother. Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And s
They Left Us Everything: A Memoir
Plum Johnson · 279 pages
"A warm, heartfelt memoir of family, loss, and a house jam-packed with decades of goods and memories. After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents--first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year old mother--author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now
The Florist's Daughter
Patricia Hampl · 240 pages