The Unstable Identities of <em>The Caregiver</em>

Samuel Park’s new novel, The Caregiver, is a study in fragility: that of bodies, of boundaries, and of identity itself. Centering on two relationships—a mother and her daughter, and the daughter and her patient—it explores the complex bonds between people who are linked by the need that one has for the other, and by “the strange love that fills one’s heart when one gives, gives, and receives little in return.” Such giving, The Caregiver shows, is risky: As the title suggests, it can come to define the person who does it, to the point that her sense of self is inextricable from others’ need. At the same time, the novel reveals how both giving care and receiving it can be ways of affirming a person’s individual worth.

is Park’s second novel, and his last; he died of stomach cancer in 2017, at the age of 41, shortly after he finished writing it.