The Pianist's Only Daughter: A Memoir presents a frank and loving exploration of aging in one family.

Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her English scholar and poet mother and her pianist father. Their vivid emotional lives, marital instability, and eventual divorce provided the backdrop for her 1960s and '70s Midwestern youth.

Nearly thirty years after they divorce, Adams' father finds himself single and flies in to woo his ex-wife, now retired and diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Their daughter doesn't expect her mother to be swept away in a romantic haze, but has underestimated the power of nostalgia and her father's charms.

"We'll take care of each other!" her father confidently declares. But their only daughter worries.

Armed with her professional social work expertise, Adams steps in to become her parents' eldercare manager as her mother's Parkinson's disease worsens. Sometimes at odds with her controlling father and often overwhelmed by the responsibility she faces, she finds shocking limitations to services for older adults in 21st century America.

Readers will laugh and cry along with the author as she describes both her successes and failures with tough eldercare decisions and situations -- including several moves with her father's 7-foot Steinway grand piano in tow.

Praise for The Pianist's Only Daughter:

" Excellent read! A book I couldn't put down-Kathryn Betts Adams shares an intimate family portrait which is skillfully woven and will resonate with you in your own journey. The Pianist's Only Daughter brings the joys and sorrows of caring for aged parents to the forefront and offers spot-on observations of the way early family dynamics reenact themselves in old age. It's a must-read for all facing this stage of life, especially poignant for only children. I will be recommending this book to the adult children of my elderly clients."
Heidi Sward, LCSW, Geriatric Social Worker, Hamden, Connecticut

"It's both a beautiful narrative history of your/our parents' era and creative life, as well as the bittersweet, difficult decline of our loved ones and the challenges of caregiving all at once. Brava!" Ginger McKnight-Chavers, Author of In the Heart of Texas: A Novel