A Night of Memoir in J.P. with MINDY FRIED and CAROLINE HELLER

Join Papercuts J.P. at La Rana Rossa for an event with two local authors on their memoirs about family.

Caring for Red is MINDY FRIED’s moving and colorful account of caring for her ninety-seven-year-old father, Manny—an actor, writer, and labor organizer—in the final year of his life. This memoir chronicles the actions of two sisters as they discover concentric circles of support for their father and attempt to provide him with an experience of “engaged aging” in an assisted living facility. As she devotes herself to caring for her dying father, Mindy grapples anew with the complexity of their relationship. She questions whether she can be there for him and how to assert her own voice as her father’s caregiver in his last days.

A elegy to a vanished time, CAROLINE HELLER’s memoir traces the lives of her parents, her uncle, and their circle of intellectuals and dreamers from Central Europe on the eve of World War II to present-day America. In this dual memoir of her parents’ lives and her own, Heller brings to life the lost world of European café culture, and reminds us of the sustaining power of literature in the most challenging of times. Reading Claudius is a profound meditation on the ways we strive to solve the mysteries of our pasts, and a window into understanding the ones we love.