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| (photo: Judith Basya) | |
Essayist and food writer Kate Washington is a dining critic for the Sacramento Bee. Her work has appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, Eater, Catapult and McSweeney's. Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America (Beacon Press, $26.95; March 16, 2021), her first book, documents the years she spent providing full-time care to her cancer-stricken husband and offers pragmatic policy solutions to the U.S. caregiving crisis.
What made you decide to write Already Toast? Was it difficult to re-live your husband Brad's intense illness through your writing?
In a way, the decision to write Already Toast evolved rather than being a conscious choice--my writings about Brad's illness began while he was still ill, in part because I was keeping an online journal to keep friends and family members informed and in part because I was in an online writers' workshop where I shared occasional bits of more personal writing--sometimes rants!--about the challenges of the situation. Writing about it was an outlet for some of the more difficult emotions I was wrestling with, particularly through the hardest year of 2016. As I came to the end of that year, I realized I was starting to have a lot of material and that there was no book out there that said the things about caregiving that I wanted to say. I hoped to write the book I'd wanted to read while I was going through it, so I took up a challenge from my workshop leader to adapt NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month, in which participants aim to write 50,000 words in the month of November] to my project, and aimed to have a full draft, of the memoir material at least. The book has taken on a very different form than that early work, and much of the revision involved adding research and context. It has been valuable--though, as you suggest, often painful--to be able to revisit that early, raw writing from when things were hardest. At the same time, often I've been reminded in writing and revising of how much easier our situation is now, and how far Brad has come, despite his ongoing chronic illness.
As you described so poignantly in Already Toast, a marriage can suffer irreparable harm when one spouse is chronically ill for an extended period and the other spouse is their full-time caregiver. What strategies have worked for you and Brad to rebuild your marriage now that he is in remission?
To be honest, it's been slow going, but we have had a lot of couples therapy as well as individual therapy. One of the challenges has been our different interests and energy levels; I'm always wanting to go places and do things, whether it's a hike or a household project, and Brad is much more content to take life slowly. In some ways the pandemic has forced me to slow down and given us some shared activities. It sounds small, but one thing we did as a family that brought us all a little closer was trivia nights: we all took turns writing trivia quizzes for the other family members. I also hurt my back at the beginning of 2020, which I don't recommend at all as a strategy, but which did have the side effect of giving Brad a bit of an opportunity to care for me. It's still a work in progress, but we're trying.
Is there a literary caregiving figure you relate to most closely?
This is a tough one! I would say that early on I identified most with the character of Leslie Moore from the Anne of Green Gables series (she appears in the fifth book, Anne's House of Dreams)--she was the subject of the first essay I published on the theme of caregiving, which appeared in Avidly. Her sense of being set apart by her situation as a caregiver really spoke to me, as did her resentment, to be honest, and her character's backstory includes the death by suicide of a parent, which I unfortunately identify with as well. I also find a lot to identify with in Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke; the issues in my marriage are very different (and my husband, as I say in the book, is hardly a Casaubon!), but her difficulty in grappling with the compromises marriage entails while staying true to both her vows and herself is something I feel deeply whenever I reread Middlemarch, which I do every couple of years.
Which countries do you think have the best support system for caregivers, whether that is caring for young children, the elderly or those chronically ill or disabled?
I haven't had the experience of caring for others in any country other than the U.S., so it's hard for me to say with certainty! But I will say that I look with longing at the kinds of support measures that are in place for families and caregivers across most of the European Union, especially the more I hear about the strain on individuals providing care to others throughout the pandemic. From what I've read, Japan is also at the forefront of efforts to rethink eldercare in particular. To me, the key is that in the U.S., the broader culture seems to think of care, in all its forms, as an individual problem to be solved--often by a woman who's already strapped for time and resources--rather than a systemic problem to be addressed by broad societal solutions. I was recently reading the author Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter, where she interviewed a sociologist, Jessica Calarco, who gave the key quote: "Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women." That has really stuck with me.
What are some of the federal policy changes with respect to caregivers that you hope to see implemented?
I often hear tax credits floated as a solution for caregivers, but personally I would much rather see relief in the form of direct aid and guaranteed paid leave for caregivers--not to mention paid sick leave and job guarantees for care recipients. Both the latter suggestions and universal health care sound like they would benefit sick individuals the most, but they have incredibly important implications for caregivers, as well. Really, though, the need for a robust social safety net is so extreme, and so interconnected, that any change would represent progress. I am hopeful that we are ready for a national reckoning with how we can better care for each other as a society. My greatest hope for Already Toast is that it can be a part of that bigger conversation. --Shahina Piyarali