Books That Get at the Angst of Unpaid Family Caregiving

I’ve written about this one in the past, but it continues to loom large, so I want to mention it again. When I picked up this book a number of years ago, I felt as if I were looking into my future. There was the anxious, aging father who eventually slips into dementia. The willful, stubborn mother who refuses to ask for help when she needs it. And then there was the daughter — Roz Chast herself — who didn’t know quite how to handle this sudden shift without completely upending her own life. This book shows a woman pushing back against what is expected of daughters, making decisions that take into account not only the care of her parents but also of herself.

This collection of essays explores the intersection of care work and disability justice, but I appreciated how — particularly in the context of the author’s personal stories — she poked at how unpaid family caregiving is so undervalued in our culture, taken for granted, with caregivers at the mercy of a system that provides almost no support. It’s a topic I’ve researched in the past, and I don’t see things getting any better anytime soon… especially not with the current administration.

Years after reading Chast’s book, I was excited to see a brand new graphic memoir that tackled similar themes. In this heartbreaking-yet-funny graphic memoir, a woman flies home to help her mother, who has fallen and is admitted to the hospital. It is soon clear to her that her mother, who also has dementia, can no longer live alone at home. The author grapples with next steps, the specter of death lurking at every turn. This book legit made me cry.

I once saw Shapiro speak at an in-person event, and she joked about being unable to stop writing memoirs. Lucky us. I believe she’s published five memoirs at this point, and each one is beautiful and relatable and necessary. In Slow Motion, Shapiro writes about how her life was spiraling out of control…until she received a call that her parents had been in an accident, and she returns home to care for them. Getting her shit together to get the job done saves her.

Finally, in this memoir, Lang writes about how the mother she has long admired has always been a source of support—until suddenly, she isn’t. As the author grapples with caring for her own young child without the help she always expected from her mother, she discovers the source of this shift: Alzheimer’s. Suddenly, Lang is learning things about her mother she never knew, learning to see her as someone outside the role of mother, learning the complexities of giving and receiving care. The mother/daughter relationship can be a wild one, and I really appreciated this deep dive into that, placed within the context of cognitive decline.