As he became increasingly disabled and immobile, these two intensely connected partners fought to maintain their love and to live a meaningful life. Writing as a sociologist, Ellis protrays their life together as a way to understand the complexities of romance, of living with a progressive illness, and, in the final negotiation and reversal of positions, of coping with the loss of a loved one. This rare memoir full of often raw details and emotions becomes an intimate conversation about the intricacies of feeling and relating in a relationship. What Ellis calls experimental ethnography is a finely crafted, forthright, and daring story framed by the author's reflections on writing about and analyzing one's own life. Casting off the safe distance of most social science inquiry, she surrenders the private shroud of a complex relationship to bring sociology closer to literature.
Death is a shared project.
Loved ones do not always go gently into the good night. This is a story of death, identity, and love. In this work Ellis gives Gene Weinstein the greatest gift of all, a loving death. We are invited into a dialectics of intimacy to experience with her the complexly layered and nuanced emotions around attachment, love, power, jealousy, anger, care-taking, loss, and recovery. In a brilliant and courageous conclusion, we see how writing with passion about the Self, connecting sociology with literature, breaking genre boundaries are acts of recovery, release, and love.