• 416 pages
  • 6 x 9
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  • Price: $37.95
  • EAN: 9781439917169
  • Publication: Oct 2018
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  • Publication: Oct 2018
  • Price: $37.95
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  • Publication: Oct 2018

Final Negotiations

A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness
Revised and Expanded Edition

Carolyn Ellis

Foreword by Arthur Bochner

  • International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry Best Book Award, 2019

Praise for the Previous Edition
“This is a remarkably revealing portrait of a couple dealing with a debilitating chronic illness.”
Kirkus Reviews

In this revised and expanded edition of Final Negotiations—a personal account of caring for her partner, Gene Weinstein, and then coping with losing him to chronic emphysema—Ellis reflects back on her experiences as a caregiver, focusing on identity, vulnerability, emotions, and the aging process of an engaged academic. Now, decades later, she reconsiders who she was then, and how she has continued to be affected both by these events and by writing about them. She contemplates how she might act, think, and feel if she were going through the caregiving process again, now.

Taking an autoethnographic perspective, Ellis focuses on her feeling and thinking self in relationships, narrating particular lived experiences that offer a gateway into understanding interpersonal and cultural life. In her new epilogue, “From New Endings to New Beginnings,” Ellis describes her changed identity and how Final Negotiations informs her life and her understanding of how she and her current partner grow older together. She hopes her book provides companionship and comfort to readers who also will suffer loss in their lives.

About the Author(s)

Carolyn Ellis is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Communication and Sociology at the University of South Florida and author of numerous books, including Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories (with Arthur Bochner). She is the co-author of Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research and the co-editor of Handbook of Autoethnography, both with Stacy Holman Jones and Tony Adams.