Overview

The Pianist's Only Daughter: A Memoir is a frank, humorous, and poignant exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family. Kathryn Betts Adams was the only daughter of colorful and talented parents: her mother, an English scholar and poet, and her father, a concert pianist and music professor. Their dramatic emotional lives, marital instability, and eventual break-up provided the backdrop for her 1960s and '70s youth. Nearly thirty years after they were divorced, her newly single father and her never-remarried mother, by then diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, have reconciled and decided to live together again. As her mother's condition deteriorates, Kathryn has to step in to help manage her care. Despite her expertise as a gerontological social worker, she finds that old family dynamics and disappointing limitations to available services for older adults make every care decision a difficult one. In the face of sometimes overwhelming responsibility, Kathryn marshals available resources to help her parents maintain their quality of life and unique humanity despite the relentless effects of time and chronic illness. Grounded in insights about health and mental health, The Pianist's Only Daughter touches on universal themes of aging, parent-child relationships, artistic expression, love, and loss through the intimate story of one family. **A Winner of the 2024 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award Spring Competition in the non-fiction, memoir genre.** ""It's both a beautiful narrative history of your/our parents' era and creative life, as well as the bittersweet, difficult decline of our loved ones and the challenges of caregiving all at once. Brava!"" Ginger McKnight-Chavers, Author of In the Heart of Texas: A Novel

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