The Art Of Caregiving In Fiction Film And Memoir

Bringing together the human story of care with its representation in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative arts.

Bringing together the human story of care with its representation in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative arts.

"From the most unlikely of unlikely romances comes a deeply felt, touching, humorous exploration of what love and age mean in today's world. I can't recommend this book highly enough." -- Stan Evans, Emmy-award winning writer, and author of Box of Mustaches When thirty-two-year-old actor Gregor Collins reluctantly interviewed for a job as a caregiver more out of a favor to a friend - he had no idea his life was about to change forever.Seconds into the chance meeting in 2008 with, it would turn out, a world-renowned Holocaust refugee named Maria Altmann, there was an unexplainable magic in the air - it felt as if they had already met. And Collins was suddenly thrown into a situation with which he had never before been confronted: caring for someone other than himself.Gregor offers us a personal and unprecedented look at Maria over the three intimate years he cared for her - her thrilling escape from the Nazis, her fight and subsequent win in the landmark Supreme Court Case to return original Gustav Klimt artwork that belonged to her family in Austria, and the extraordinary people she met along the way. But the real heart of the story transcends mere historical facts.Through a refreshingly raw portrayal of their unlikely and unbreakable bond, imbued with humorous, candid anecdotes about his mercurial relationship with Hollywood, Gregor takes us on a deeply emotional journey of how he opened up his heart to a 92-year-old woman in need - and in turn experienced the love he had been searching for his entire life.

For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost-his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he has enrolled in a night class called the Fundamentals of Caregiving. There he learns the basics of the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability, and he is instructed about professionalism and how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned his first client-a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy-he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world. Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens while they're on a road trip to visit Trev's ailing father-a journey diverted by a series of bizarre must-see roadside attractions that propels them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life. Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life's terrible surprises as well as the heart's uncanny capacity to mend.

#1 New York Times Bestseller 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist 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 elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”-with predictable results-the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies-an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades-the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.

For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost—his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he has enrolled in a night class called the Fundamentals of Caregiving. There he learns the basics of the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability, and he is instructed about professionalism and how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned his first client—a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world. Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens while they're on a road trip to visit Trev's ailing father—a journey diverted by a series of bizarre must-see roadside attractions that propels them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life. Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life's terrible surprises as well as the heart's uncanny capacity to mend.

Bringing together the human story of care with its representation in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative arts.

"I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing." So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved for her incandescent novels. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley attempts to uncover the real Iris, whose mysterious world took on darker shades as she descended into Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a luminous memoir about the beauty of youth and aging, and a celebration of a brilliant life and an undying love.