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PRESS
A conversation with Sarah Ruhl for Skylight Books’ podcast
Why has Society Failed to Integrate Grief into Public Life? Interview for The Nation
A conversation on A PUBLIC AFFAIR for WORT.FM
Learning From End of Life Care Workers Now and After COVID-19 for Dirt.DMV
Small Press Distribution Staff Pick!
What does a project about death, care work, and feelings have to do with the Green New Deal? Interview with Thick Press
PRAISE
Selected by Entropy Magazine as a best nonfiction book of 2020 & 2021!
Stages is one of a very few recent books I have read that feels truly revolutionary, in both form and in content. It consists of documentary materials assembled, in a style somewhere between Svetlana Alexievich and André Breton, by a young writer, while staging a theater production in a nursing home. In a series of eye-opening interviews, she talks to housekeepers and nurses from Jamaica and Ghana about ghosts and family structure; to a clinical nutritionist, who explains how she helps people stop eating food, after a lifetime of eating food. Basically we’re on a tour of a parallel institutionalized world of aging and dying which has been zealously cordoned off from the rest of American life, and which is not without its Kafkaesque elements, but our guide, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, is so humane, curious and visionary that the overall effect is energizing and uplifting. Reading Stages gave me the revelatory feeling of looking at something I’d been dreading, and seeing that it was actually OK, and vital, and a major part of life. Stages brings humanity, humor, and a strong visual sensibility to a taboo subject, with exhilarating results. It expanded the way I think about family, theater, and a “good life.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
In Stages, we accompany Rachel Kauder Nalebuff in her creation of a play we will not see, performed by the caregivers of a nursing home. Her anecdotes, visions, labors, and images of care spark something intense and brief: an intimacy with every widow, nursing assistant, partner, friend, or unnamed and deceased resident that Nalebuff witnesses. Every page pinches you—sometimes bringing tears, sometimes with a familiar, forgiving hand, asking if you are awake.
—Franny Weed, SPD Staff Pick!
Caring work, emotional labor, and end- of-life care are useful abstractions; this wonderful book that weaves together interviews with nursing home workers and the author’s own reflections on life, death, and making art, fills them with life. Given that we all die, and that most of us will care for others and require care ourselves in that process, everyone should read this book, sit with it, and absorb its lessons.
—Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
Stages is the kind of story-telling that we need more of. Care is so fundamental to who we are and the values we all share, and yet is too often hidden away rather than celebrated. Whether we are caregivers for our own family members, or whether we are professional caregivers, this role stitches together the very fabric of our society, connects generations and cultures. This story is told beautifully in Stages.
—Ai-jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Director of Caring Across Generations
It’s a book about health care, but it’s also a book about time and workers’ rights and intimacy, which is part of what makes it deeply feminist
—Sam Huber, The Nation