Books

After a decades-long estrangement, Carla Seaquist sets out four decades later to repair the bond with her aging mother, one kitchen-table conversation at a time. A memoir of late reconciliation.

After nearly three decades of motherhood, columnist Rita Lussier faces a sudden empty nest — rekindling her marriage and career while caring for aging parents. A memoir of midlife reinvention.

At about 60, Gretchen Staebler moved in to care for her 96-year-old mother through dementia. Written close to the events, the memoir is candid about the reluctance in its subtitle and about what caring for a parent at the end of life asks of a daughter.

Over a ten-year search, the author comes to know the Cuban-exile father she barely knew, alongside an adopted Cherokee-Jewish soldier father and an Iranian stepfather — each a different version of love and absence. Confronting inherited wounds, she dismantles the myths she carried about her fathers and herself.

Why it’s here: A woman in her later life pieces together three fathers and her own inheritance — a mature reckoning with family and identity.

Anna Quindlen became a grandmother at sixty-four, and found herself in territory no amount of parenting had prepared her for — no longer the decision-maker, now a supporting player in her grandson’s life. Her warm, honest essays trace the unexpected pleasures and complicated emotions of the role, and reflect on what it means to watch your own child become a parent.

A dual-timeline memoir braiding a pioneering whitewater-kayaking career with the author’s post-menopause, post-retirement plunge into first-time parenting of an at-risk young nephew.

Poet Janet Mason reflects on the factory-working lives of her mother and grandmother in working-class Philadelphia while she cares for her mother through her final illness, and on the choices open to her as a lesbian daughter that were never open to her mother.

The definitive guide for families caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or other dementias. Practical, compassionate, and comprehensive — a must-have for the millions of women who are dementia caregivers, usually for a parent or spouse.

A candid, funny-but-brutal memoir-in-essays about the four years spent caring for a dying eighty-six-year-old father — refusing to romanticize caregiving or its toll on a family.