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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Idealized Caregiver in Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilych
2. Caregivers as Prisoners For Life in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome
3. Unmasking the Caregiver in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
4. The Caregiver as Matchmaker in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over The Mountain” and Sarah Polley’s Away From Her
5. Caregiving Strategies For Survival in John Bayley’s Elegy For Iris, Iris And Her Friends, and Widower’s House
6. A Few True Things About Caregiving in Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing
7. The Avenging Caregiver in Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother
8. Murderous Caregiving in Michael Haneke’s Amour
9. The Divine Gift Of Caregiving in Walter Mosley’s The Last Days Of Ptolemy Grey
10. Caregiving as a Progress Narrative in Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Writings
11. Caregivers Struggling to Make the Right Decisions
in Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal
Conclusion: Caregiving: A Beautiful Story?
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany, USA. He has written on a wide range of subjects, including literature and psychoanalysis, the pedagogy of self-disclosure, love and loss, and death education.
Summary
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.
Foreword
This book offers a personal and scholarly journey into the world of caregiving as depicted in fiction, film and memoir.
Additional text
No stranger to caregiving in illness, Jeffrey Berman, an outstandingly gifted teacher, scholar and writer, fulfills his inspiration through close readings of several art forms, to give his reader a living exposure to the difficult feelings, intricate attitudes and transforming relationships among those who offer aid during another person’s demise. We range from the tenderness and exasperation of John Bayley’s “Elegy for Iris” during her Alzheimer’s, akin to “Sisyphus pushing his rock up a mountain”; to the bitter despair of Wharton’s characters in Ethan Frome; to the minutiae of human death in Tolstoy; to the merger of nurse and nursed in Ingmar’s “Persona” or the “violence of euthanasia” in Haneke’s “Amour,” or the ethics of Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal.” The text provides emotional narratives of the creators’ involvement with their stories as well. This is a deeply satisfying book. It confronts eloquently, with compassion and complexity end-of-life issues that few dare contemplate so openly and with such courage and range.
