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Rebecca McClanahan's book offers a refreshing perspective on caregiving's complexities.

Her caregiving story examines unique family dynamics with depth and empathy.

Integrating literature, McClanahan helps readers navigate grief and meaning.

As someone who has published and taught about caregiving and its abundant accompanying challenges for adult children, I’m often asked how I managed to do it, how I came to think about family as a result of it, and how I balanced the whole of my life alongside it. I find myself drawn to others’ stories of caregiving especially when, like in a Venn diagram, there are dimensions that intersect and those that radically diverge, pushing me to think in new ways about age-old questions and dilemmas.

At a time when bookshelves are packed with books about families, relationships, dementia, and grief, you might think, who needs yet one more book about all of this depressing stuff? But here’s the thing: we can always benefit from a new take on a common issue. That’s why some of the most powerful and compelling works of literature, film, poetry, music, and art offer us a fresh riff on that which seems familiar, whether it’s love, marriage, sexuality, divorce, birth, illness, or death. It’s in the new ways of telling that we acquire new ways of knowing, new ways of being and moving about in the world.

We all have a lot to gain when the best writers of our time generously share the particular truths of their innermost lives, all the while highlighting how their personal pain is linked to larger social patterns. This is where the treasured writer, Rebecca McClanahan, comes in. In her brand-new book titled Light Falls on Everything: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving, Grief, and Possibility (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), McClanahan weaves a........

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