Thirty million people today care for ailing family members in their own homes--a number that will increase dramatically over the next decade as baby boomers enter old age, as soldiers return home from war mentally and physically wounded, as medical advances extend lives and health insurance fails to cover them.

Offering both companionship and guidance to the people who find themselves caring for their intimates, "An Uncertain Inheritance" is a collection of essays from some of the country's most accomplished writers. Poignant, honest, sometimes heartbreaking, often wry, and funny, here is a book that examines caregiving from every angle, revealing the pain, intimacy, and grace inherent in this meaningful relationship.

Riveting, funny, heartbreaking, at once raw and lyrical: these journals reveal the extraordinary inner life of the actor-writer who invented the autobiographical monologue and perfected the form in such celebrated works as "Swimming to Cambodia."
Begun when he was twenty-five, Spalding Gray's journals reflect on his childhood; his craving for success; the downtown New York arts scene of the 1970s; his love affairs, marriages, and fatherhood; his travels in Europe and Asia; and throughout, his passion for the theater, where he worked to balance his compulsion to tell all with his fear of having his deepest secrets exposed. "The Journals of Spalding Gray" gives us a haunting portrait of a creative genius who we thought had told us everything about himself--until now.