AGING OUT

 I am thrilled to be sharing with you journalist and Iowa MFA Lucy Schiller’s debut work of investigative nonfiction, AGING OUT: Corporate Greed and the Lives of Our Future Selves. In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich and Eula Biss’ On Immunity, Schiller exposes the inner workings of the elder care industry, revealing a disturbing landscape where neglect, exploitation, and deep isolation among seniors work in concert to feed a lucrative business for health care companies, senior living corporations, private equity funds, and shady public-private contractors. With a striking blend of investigative rigor and personal grounding, Schiller writes from her perspective as a millennial to show how the failings of our elder care system affect and implicate all of us: seniors and those who love them; careworkers, a group which increasingly includes the elderly themselves; and all of our future selves, as this is a group that we all hope to enter sooner or later.

The pandemic opened a window into the poor treatment and isolation the elderly regularly face and just how much worse things could get, and how low their lives stood as a priority in our disaster response. AGING OUT’s narrative begins with the stories of Schiller’s two grandmothers in this time. When Schiller’s family moved her maternal grandmother, Louise, out of her assisted living facility after learning that the company’s Covid-positive patients from all over the area were being transferred there, Schiller was tapped, as the family member with the fewest obligations, to care for her. Quarantining with her grandmother, Schiller began to investigate Brookdale, the private equity-backed company that owned Louise’s facility, and which was already embroiled in a surprising number of high-profile lawsuits and would come under increasing pressure as the pandemic wore on.

As the failures of Brookdale and its competitors to contain impacts of the virus gain attention, the industry is increasingly turning toward in-home care as an alternative. Schiller’s paternal grandmother, Anita, fiercely independent and still cognitively sharp, had been living on her own for 20 years when the virus hit. Blind in one eye and with a debilitating hand tremor, she depended on a network of home health aides to help her manage the basic tasks of her daily life. When one of these aides exposed Anita to Covid, this network evaporated overnight, leaving her grandmother to fend for herself while her family, trapped across the country by travel restrictions, searched fruitlessly for help. After a series of cruelties including being turned away from triage at an urgent care clinic, Anita died. Schiller was forced, as so many were, to say final goodbyes over a glitchy Zoom call.

These experiences profoundly affected Schiller and set her on a path to uncover the tangled network of the senior care industries to understand the current reality seniors face as well as where the industry is headed and how we might steer it towards something better. Schiller explores the increasing gigification of senior care, particularly through a VC-funded startup called Papa, modeled on Uber, which claims to provide “family on demand” to seniors in need. She also connects with seniors in her community in Pittsburgh, forming a close friendship with Lenora, a 72-year-old ex-Broadway actress who is also grieving a loved one who suffered shocking neglect at a nearby nursing home. And she investigates alternative models, looking to America’s past as well as international models and grassroots experiments in community-based care and mutual aid. As a whole, this multi-faceted investigation forms a painfully clear picture of an incredibly urgent issue in which we all have a vital stake. Schiller’s call for a turn to community, connection, and care will inspire readers at all stages of their lives to fight for a better future together.

Lucy Schiller is an award-winning investigative journalist and essayist whose work on the elder care industry and investigations into corporate power have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Hell World, the Iowa Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Popula. Since earning her MFA in nonfiction at Iowa, she has taught nonfiction writing at Colgate University in addition to her writing and freelance editing work. Editors at Harper’s and at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project have both expressed interest in supporting this project, and Schiller has recently been named a finalist for the New America Foundation National Fellowship based on her work for this project.