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Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 2, Spring 2023
- pp. 989-1011
- 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907156
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
"Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women, many of them Black and/or immigrants, performing this important job for meager wages. Eldercare memoirs are thus substantially concerned with the nature and devaluation of a particular form of labor. Dramatizing its feminization, they lead me to pursue a further question: to what extent are female aides and their unequal, quasi-familial relationships with daughters given space in these narratives? Texts treated in detail include Sue Miller's The Story of My Father (2003) and Ruth Tosic's I Am Not the Girl: Memoirs of a Certified Nursing Assistant (2021).