The Pianist's Only Daughter: A Memoir - Paperback

by Kathryn Betts Adams (Author)

Grounded in insights about mental health, health and aging, The Pianist's Only Daughter: A Memoir presents a frank and loving exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.

Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her English scholar and poet mother and her pianist father. Their vivid emotional lives, marital instability, and eventual divorce provided the backdrop for her 1960s and '70s Midwestern youth.

Nearly thirty years after they divorce, Adams' father finds himself single and flies in to woo his ex-wife, now retired and diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Their daughter doesn't expect her mother to be swept away in a romantic haze, but has underestimated the power of nostalgia and her father's charms.

"We'll take care of each other!" her father confidently declares. But their only daughter worries.

Armed with her professional social work expertise, Adams steps in to become her parents' eldercare manager as her mother's Parkinson's disease worsens. Sometimes at odds with her controlling father and often overwhelmed by the responsibility she faces, she finds shocking limitations to services for older adults in 21st century America.

With equal parts heartbreak and humor, The Pianist's Only Daughter eloquently explores universal themes of family relationships, artistic expression, love and loss.

**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