Kathryn’s father is a narcissistic piano player, and her mother a talented poet. Both spend their lives teaching and navigating a tumultuous relationship, and the author is often caught in the middle. As the first half of THE PIANIST’S ONLY DAUGHTER traces her fraught childhood in the 1960s and 70s, the second half follows an equally grueling era: taking care of her aging parents and navigating a confusing (and sometimes predatory) elderly care system.
Kathryn Betts Adams has an expressive writing style that packs in a great deal of detail, as when she describes herself in the mirror: “periodically when I peer at myself in the bathroom mirror, I hold the skin folds of my chin taut against my earlobes, erasing the years with one small motion.” Even though the memoir is about her parents, her kindness and reasonableness will make readers hungry for more information about her own life. These details are few and far between. Over the 200 or so pages, the author keeps a razor-sharp focus on her parents, writing about her life only to illustrate her parents’. Her learning and schooling are mentioned insofar as they disappoint her father; her hobbies and interests appear only to show how they were a way to bond with her mother. Most of the poetry in the book is her mother’s, and most of the photographs show her parents aging as the narrative progresses.
She skates over her own life as an independent adult, leaving for school, jobs, marriages, and children—maneuvering us into watching breathlessly as the pianist and the poetess begin to wither and succumb to various illnesses. Her mother Jane bears the travails of Parkinsons and cancer sweetly, but it’s still a challenge to help her through her last days. Her father Don is entirely another story.
From the very beginning, the author is held hostage to his selfish whims. Punctuating the author’s childhood with his “blue moods” and extra-marital affairs, he fills her middle age with stubborn refusals to compromise or make her job finding him help any easier. Her training as a social worker allows Kathryn Betts Adams to manage her own feelings about her father, but, as readers, getting through his tantrums and ego is difficult. One glaring example is when he cheats on his wife with a married woman and insists that he is entitled to both. It is only the writer’s skill that keeps him human and makes sure the story remains interesting as she lays out the way elderly care, especially Medicare, is full of loopholes for patients to fall through.
In describing her parents’ ordeal, she is advocating for the elderly across America against a system determined to bleed them dry.
THE PIANIST’S ONLY DAUGHTER: A Memoir is a clear-eyed and poignant account of one of the most difficult chapters of American life. Kathryn Betts Adams writes with a grace and generosity of spirit that will disarm even the most cynical reader.
~Sakina Hassan for IndieReader