Overview

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.

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9781350185364

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Reviews

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. * Rosemary H. Balsam, F.R.C.Psych (London); Assoc. Clinical Prof of Psychiatry, Yale Medical School; winner 2018 Sigourney Award for Psychoanalytic Advancement. *

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. * Rosemary H. Balsam, F.R.C.Psych (London); Assoc. Clinical Prof of Psychiatry, Yale Medical School; winner 2018 Sigourney Award for Psychoanalytic Advancement. * 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. As he writes: 'caregiving stories take us to places we don't wish to visit, places that reveal decline and death, and for this reason these stories are often unspeakable' (p 260). I found many of the accounts overwhelming in their emotional intensity...Much of my academic career was spent teaching on social work programmes, where the curriculum is often shaped by the expectations of regulatory bodies and employers. The insistence that students were able to speedily transition from academia to a process-driven care marketplace meant that creativity was often marginalised in the haste to cram in the latest policy framework. Fiction and memoir enable us to find new ways of seeing; reading this account, I found myself reflecting on how a different pedagogical approach to exploring the art of caring might look. This is an important text that deserves a strong and engaged readership. * Mark Foord, International Journal of Care and Caring *

Author Information

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.

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