Books

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.

Tweit and her husband got his terminal brain-cancer diagnosis and decided to spend the time left travelling and looking at birds. A caregiving memoir that is honest about the tedium and indignity as well as the love. Winner of the Sarton Women Book Award.

Sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain why women experience burnout differently than men, and offer science-backed strategies for completing the stress cycle and recovering your wellbeing. Essential for women who have spent decades caregiving, working, and putting themselves last.

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast turns her signature anxious wit on the hardest subject: her elderly parents’ final years. This graphic memoir is funny, wrenching, and utterly honest about the mess of aging parents, overwhelmed adult children, and the things families can’t quite say out loud. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

n this poignant tale, Jong interweaves the narrator’s sexual experience in her sixties with tales of her formerly glamorous parents as their health fails. As my own mother told me when she was in her nineties and I was in my sixties, “Enjoy your youth.”

Jong’s protagonist is determined to do just that. She works hard to reclaim the joys of her long-term marriage, and dances to the siren music of potential affairs. Ripe women have been dancing that tightrope for centuries without the benefit of literary models; Jong’s art makes visible what has been invisible. For those of us determined to prioritize our own erotic and creative lives, even while doing our best for aging parents and young adult children, this book holds up a mirror to the lives we are leading.

Chicana playwright and activist Cherríe Moraga braids her own coming-of-age and coming out with the story of her mother, Elvira, and Elvira’s long decline into Alzheimer’s. It is a memoir about memory, inheritance, and the grief of watching a parent fade — and, through one family, a larger reckoning with Mexican American identity and belonging.

A childless woman in her late fifties tells the unvarnished truth of caring for her older husband as Alzheimer’s dismantles the retirement they’d planned on the Oregon coast.

Sheehy maps caregiving as a passage with predictable stages, drawn from her own seventeen years of it. Practical about the logistics and unusually direct about the resentment, exhaustion and identity loss that the role carries.

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 faith-based guide for adult children — most often daughters — caring for aging parents. Drawing on her own experience, Jane Daly offers practical help with the hard decisions and the harder moments, woven together with Christian encouragement about grace, forgiveness, and finding peace through the caregiving season.

The Hugo Award-winning novelette that launched the Lady Astronaut series. Decades after her fame, Dr. Elma York is sixty-three and grounded on a Mars colony, caring for her dying husband, when she is offered one last mission — a chance to fly again that would mean leaving him for good. A quietly devastating story about aging, love, duty, and what we owe the people with whom we have built a life.

Poems written after the death of Peacock’s husband, refusing what she calls the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence. Covers the long caregiving before the loss as well as the color that returns after it.

A poet, ‘a stranger to death,’ learns her brother is dying and confronts hidden family truths; before she can absorb his loss, her aging mother’s health fails. A meditation on grief, caregiving, and mortality.

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.

Divorced and middle-aged, Kim returns to Florida to help her aging mother and is pulled into a cascade of family crises, including relatives coping with dementia. A standalone later-in-life women’s fiction novel.

Suze Orman addresses the financial challenges unique to women — pay gaps, caregiving breaks, longer lifespans — with a concrete action plan for retirement, savings, and financial independence.