What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorPatrimony
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 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.
The Old King in His Exile
Arno Geiger · 224 pages
Special Exits
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 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
Displacement: A Travelogue
Lucy Knisley · 156 pages
"In the next installment of her graphic memoir series, Displacement, Knisley volunteers to watch over her ailing grandparents on a cruise. (The book's watercolors evoke the ocean that surrounds them.) In a book that is part graphic memoir, part travelogue, and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their younger and older selves. She is aided
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
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
Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother
Meg Federico · 208 pages
The adventure begins when Meg's mother, Addie, vacationing in Florida, takes a spill. At the hospital, Addie bolts upright on her gurney and yells "I demand an autopsy!" before passing out cold."One minute, she is unconscious, the next, she's nuts," observes Meg Federico in this hilarious and poignant memoir of taking care of eighty-year-old Addie and her relatively new (and equally old) husband,
Bettyville
George Hodgman · 278 pages
"A witty, tender memoir of a son's journey home to care for his irascible mother--a tale of secrets, silences, and enduring love. When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself--an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook--in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell fre
Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's
Lauren Kessler · 272 pages
One journalist's surprisingly hopeful in-the-trenches look at Alzheimer's, the disease that claimed her mother's life. Like many loved ones of Alzheimer's sufferers, Lauren Kessler was devastated by the disease that seemed to turn her mother into another person before claiming her life altogether. To deal with the pain of her loss, and to better understand the confounding aspects of living with th
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
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 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
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.
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
Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter
Diana Athill · 172 pages
"A luminous, wise, and joyful insight into what really matters at the end of a long life, from the beloved author of the award-winning Somewhere Towards the End. What will you remember if you live to be 100? Diana Athill charmed readers with her prize-winning memoir Somewhere Towards the End, which transformed her into an unexpected literary star. Now, on the eve of her ninety-eighth birthday, Ath
Elsewhere
Richard Russo · 251 pages
This work is the author's memoir of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. Anyone familiar with the author's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a good-time, second-fiddle father
Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir
Penelope Lively · 234 pages
"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But s
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 Florist's Daughter
Patricia Hampl · 240 pages
New Life, No Instructions
Gail Caldwell · 192 pages