Art of Caregiving in Fiction, Film, and Memoir

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.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Idealized Caregiver in Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilych2. Caregivers as Prisoners For Life in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome3. Unmasking the Caregiver in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona4. The Caregiver as Matchmaker in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over The Mountain” and Sarah Polley’s Away From Her5. Caregiving Strategies For Survival in John Bayley’s Elegy For Iris, Iris And Her Friends, and Widower’s House6. A Few True Things About Caregiving in Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing7. The Avenging Caregiver in Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother8. Murderous Caregiving in Michael Haneke’s Amour9. The Divine Gift Of Caregiving in Walter Mosley’s The Last Days Of Ptolemy Grey10. Caregiving as a Progress Narrative in Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Writings 11. Caregivers Struggling to Make the Right Decisionsin Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal Conclusion: Caregiving: A Beautiful Story?Works CitedIndex

The reassuring, vaguely psychedelic, pastel-blue clouds on the cover of this book little prepared me for the emotional shock and awe I experienced reading much of the text ... Berman has produced an honest and richly nuanced text. He convincingly describes how literature acts as a form of simulation, through which our receptivity to emotion is heightened by placing ourselves in the situations of characters. As a result, we become susceptible to ‘being infected’ by emotions such as grief, shame, disgust and guilt ... This is an important text that deserves a strong and engaged readership.