Recommendations from our site
“Emily starts the book by pulling us up and reminding us that everyone is going to face this issue in their lives: there is hardly anyone who escapes needing to care for someone. I use the word escapes because I think she would describe the care that she had to do for her mother, who was dying, as a prison and one of the most appalling things that she’s ever had to do in her life.
Emily weaves in her own story of unpicking a care system and working through it and looking after her mother who died with the macro issue that we are trying to reckon with as a country and globally. It’s a really phenomenal interweaving of her own personal story—which is extremely upsetting and very hard to read at moments—with deeply researched statistics and the way that the care structures in this country work. It’s the perfect Orwell book, in a way, because you’ve got this amazing narrative and this extremely personal reveal of what Emily had to go through, coupled with research and political points about how we need to restructure care in this country.”
