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Caregiving and Burnout in America
by Kate Washington
The story of one woman's struggle to care for her seriously ill husband--and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support.
Already Toast shows how all-consuming caregiving can be, how difficult it is to find support, and how the social and literary narratives that have long locked women into providing emotional labor also keep them in unpaid caregiving roles. When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad's diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver.
Brad's cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors' appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs. She became so burned out that, when she took an online quiz on caregiver self-care, her result cheerily declared: "You're already toast!"
Through it all she felt profoundly alone, but, as she later learned, she was in fact one of millions: an invisible army of family caregivers working every day in America, their unpaid labor keeping our troubled healthcare system afloat. Because our culture both romanticizes and erases the realities of care work, few caregivers have shared their stories publicly.
As the baby-boom generation ages, the number of family caregivers will continue to grow. Readable, relatable, timely, and often raw, Already Toast--with its clear call for paying and supporting family caregivers--is a crucial intervention in that conversation, bringing together personal experience with deep research to give voice to those tasked with the overlooked, vital work of caring for the seriously ill.
"This is a timely and crucial appeal." - Booklist (starred review)
"Washington chronicles in her wrenching debut the devastating ordeal of her husband being diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma and the two years she spent, from 2016 to 2018, taking care of him...Washington's tale serves as both an evocative memoir and a strident call to action." - Publishers Weekly
"Washington evinces a righteous anger about the indignities she faced as a caregiver...and her raw emotions can lead to rough-around-the-edges writing. Nonetheless...she offers a welcome Gen-X perspective on a topic that mostly focuses on boomer caregivers...A startling, hard-hitting story of a family medical disaster made worse by cultural insensitivities to caregivers." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Already Toast was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kate Washington is an essayist and food writer who currently serves as the dining critic for the Sacramento Bee. Her work has appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, Eater, Catapult, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She lives in Northern California.
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