Longevity can be both a blessing and a curse. Her experience of being sandwiched in this especially gruelling way is the knot of pain around which her memoir is constructed. In a television interview the author gave while promoting her book, the term Sandwich Generation comes up several times, and refers to the period when a grown child is pressed into caring for an aging parent while still raising their own children. It’s hard to read They Left Us Everything without meandering in and out of our own memories and life history because it’s a book about the universal, eventual experience of the death of a parent and its aftermath. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall the day they discussed it: I wonder how far their conversations strayed from the particulars of Plum Johnson’s story how personal and anecdotal they became. Artist and writer Plum Johnson’s prize winning memoir, They Left Us Everything, was among the titles included on the Stewart Hall Book Club’sreading list last year.
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