Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness

Health, Society, and Policy

by Carolyn Ellis

When Carolyn Ellis, a graduate student, and Gene Weinstein, her Professor, fell in love, he was experiencing the first stages of emphysema. As he became disabled and immobile, these two partners fought to maintain their love and to live a meaningful life. This memoir is about what it means to be involved, and in love, with someone chronically ill.

Genres: Sociology, Memoir

358 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Carolyn Ellis is an interdisciplinary scholar and qualitative researcher, widely regarded as an originator and developer of autoethnography, a reflexive approach to research, writing, and storytelling that connects the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.

She is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida and an Honorary Professor at the Communication University of China. She served as President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and is a founding member of the Ethnography Division in the National Communication Association and the Section on Emotions in the American Sociological Association. Among her publications are a documentary film, five monographs, six edited books, and more than 150 articles, book chapters, and essays on autoethnography, ethnography, compassionate and interactive interviewing, research ethics, death and dying, minor bodily stigmas, caregiving, intimate relationships, health and illness, and research with Holocaust survivors.[4][5] Ellis retired from the University of South Florida in 2018.

Reviews

[Tarmia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Sometimes I stare at Gene, wondering how we got to this point" - Ellis, p. 257.

Looking back over this book I find myself wondering how a book made me feel so many different emotions. The start of the book took me by surprise. I am a PhD student and therefore experience the backstage of the academy and my University. And boy were the 70s a different time in academia.
I also found myself in deep sadness, awe, confusion, and frustration along with Ellis during this story. I read this book for academic purposes but ended somewhere else by the end of it. I have a feeling that this book will stay with me for a long time to come.

[Shannon Kitchen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it for the story more than the sociological aspect of it. Parts of it were very hard to read. It's an honest look at the dying process in a relationship.

[Jeni · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific ethnography on the human condition.. A compelling true story that you relate to even if you've never been in even a slightly similar situation.