Someone on GoodReads criticized Mary Pipher's book, Another Country, as more descriptive than offering the prescriptive advice the reader had expected.
That more or less describes all of Mary's books, which is probably why they've made such a resounding difference in my life. She is a psychologist, but writes as if she is your friend, sharing insights culled from a lifetime of sitting across allegorical kitchen tables, having tea & conversations.
Mary Pipher, PhD speaks like the non-professional that I am, which gives me comfort.
And how wonderful that she doesn't prescribe answers to our current aging dilemma. No one, including Mary, knows what they are. She would be spouting gobbly gook disguised as wisdom. She sticks to vignettes because that's all that we have at this moment in time. Stories. And the insights that can come from them.
I felt for the reader. Another Country is definitely NOT for people who are feeling "very, very, very, very angry and
frustrated and as if they've been completely abandonded with two
deranged, rabid animals while their siblings wave from a distance and
say things like 'I'll be coming over to help soon' and then disappear
into the mist." That person (I presume the reader) needs serious help, and Mary makes no bones that her book comes close to filling that particular need.
People will probably say the same thing when Gran-fam-boly! hits the bookshelves - "it doesn't give caregivers suggestions on how to encourage socialization for people with forms of dementia & Alzheimer's." People these days often don't recognize, can't relate to gentle help & support when it's given, they're so exposed to extreme scenarios.
Another Country doesn't provide answers. But it does provide context, illustrations, a sense of not being alone. Last year, another reader grumbled that Mary elevates people who embodied "self-sacrifice
above all. Those individuals who spent their lives taking care of
others were lifted up as heroes in the face of their own lack of living." The book was published in 1999 & focuses on people of my own mother's generation, the generation of my primary grannie clients; by the tone & focus of the comment, my guess is it was written by someone my age or younger. "In the face of their own lack of living" - I doubt Mom saw it that way. Mary, god bless her, explains in so many ways where that thinking came from.
Is Another Country in any way intended to be the final say in understanding the terrain that older people - especially the significantly elderly, the ones she calls the older-older - have to travel? No how, no way, not what she intended. But it's a darn good start, an excellent read. .
People will probably say the same thing when Gran-fam-boly! hits the bookshelves. Bring it on!
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