P040 My Elderly Young Child, Clarissa Green

Families, in turn, are knit together or torn apart by the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

Clarissa Green understands the world-creating power of stories. The author, who died in August, 2020 after seeing her book to publication, practised as a family therapist in Vancouver for decades, specializing in the dilemmas of adult children and their frail, elderly parents.

Clarissa reads from her book Grownupedness, a meditation on what she learned, both in her clinical practice and in her own family. Her particular interest is in the way that adult children and their parents all yearn to be seen by other family members as competent, mature adults. Hence the playful title of this remarkable book, “Grownupedness.”

These are deftly sketched accounts of family pain, laughter and renewal as families respond to the traumas of aging and the looming presence of death. Green, who worked hard in local creative writing programs and writers’ groups to perfect her craft as a storyteller, brings these fraught moments of family dynamics to life with vivid descriptions and telling anecdotes.

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