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A mother’s memoir that reckons with her son’s descent into severe mental illness. What appears to be substance use disorder in high school later becomes a dual diagnosis as bipolar disorder emerges. Her son soon grows disillusioned with prescribed pharmaceuticals and participates in a residential treatment program that assists people in forgoing medication altogether. However, the program ultimately ejects him from the community for the very behaviors that the medication once managed. The book chronicles Sandler's initial denial of her truth, her painful awakening to mental illness in her family, and her eventual acceptance that she cannot save her son—only he can save himself.

Who cares for parental caregivers? The short answer is, parenting groups do. Who Cares for Parents examines how parenting groups collectively build and contribute significant resources to form a broader care infrastructure for adult family caregivers with children. This book looks at the content of care parenting groups provide for parents, through comparative research including mothers, fathers, and nonbinary parents. Cases include some of the most recognizable parenting groups in the United States, some with vast networks of parent members numbering in the thousands or even millions, like the Parent Teacher Association, La Leche League, and MOMS Club International. The book also examines newer and, perhaps, less well known groups like the City Dads Group, the Upper East Side (UES) Mommas, as well as smaller sets of local dads’ groups and a babysitting co-op.

Can parents in the contemporary United States secure some of the necessary resources to provide care, not only for their children but also for themselves, through parenting groups? The evidence from this research suggests they can. Parenting groups have a long history of organizing membership, meetings, education, material resources, and advocacy to provide for parents’ needs. Parenting groups’ ideologies and practices often seek broad goals, and sometimes include far reaching advocacy, innovative solutions, and possibilities for what Price-Glynn calls strategic parenting and social change. Alongside their successes, however, parenting groups also face challenges of producing narrow and temporary alliances, exclusion, and exacerbating inequalities. Despite their many challenges, Price-Glynn remains hopeful about the possibilities for non-familial and collective care infrastructure like that performed by parent groups.
 

Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award in Memoir and the National Indie Excellence Awards Juror's Choice Prize

A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women

For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn’t be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.

The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women’s experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield’s life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother’s history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.

Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body—in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance—and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression.