Seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer, a retired schoolteacher, is placed by her family in a rundown rural nursing home, where neglect and small cruelties threaten to erase her. In a secret journal she fights to hold onto her dignity, her memory, and her sense of self. May Sarton’s spare, searing novel is one of the most honest accounts ever written of institutional aging and the will to remain fully human.
