Visiting, the intimate and deeply observant collection of diary entries by award-winning author Polly Walker Blakemore, has received the Literary Titan Gold Book Award, an honor recognizing books that demonstrate excellence in writing, storytelling, and reader impact.
Blakemore’s Visiting chronicles the two and a half years she spent visiting her mother after she entered hospice with dementia and depression. What began as an effort to record what seemed like her mother’s final months became a tender, wry, and clear-eyed portrait of a daughter, a mother, and the devoted caregivers who accompanied them through the slow, uncertain landscape of end-of-life care.
A lifelong diarist, Blakemore understood the power of preserving small, ordinary moments. In Visiting, she captures the quiet rituals that define family life and caregiving: watching Food Network and vet shows, discussing favorite burgers, moving between the TV room and sunroom, managing pills and diapers, sharing meals, and sitting together when words begin to fade. These seemingly simple moments become the heart of the book, revealing how presence itself can be an act of love.
Literary Titan praised Visiting as “a tender, funny, unsentimental diary” and highlighted the book’s refusal to romanticize caretaking. The review noted Blakemore’s honesty in portraying caregiving as exhausting, repetitive, bodily, funny, boring, poignant, and deeply meaningful, often all at once. Through vivid domestic detail and emotional clarity, Visiting explores grief, memory, identity, aging, dementia, and the complicated intimacy between mothers and daughters.
Visiting stands out for its ability to find both humor and tenderness in difficult circumstances. Blakemore writes with a sharp eye for the absurdities of decline while also honoring the quiet ache of loss, the persistence of memory, and the way a life is preserved through habits, objects, foods, phrases, and the recollections of those left behind.
For readers who have cared for an aging parent, sat beside a loved one in hospice, or wondered whether “just being there” is enough, Visiting offers a gentle and powerful answer. Sometimes, it is everything.
Readers can purchase Visiting by Polly Walker Blakemore on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This award-winning chronicle is an essential read for anyone drawn to reflective nonfiction about caregiving, dementia, family, grief, aging, and the quiet grace found in ordinary days.
About the Author
Polly Walker Blakemore is an award-winning author living in Louisville, Kentucky. As a diarist for over 35 years attuned to the nature of consciousness and attention, Blakemore brings to her writing about day-to-day life a richness of observation, emotional insight, and literary craft. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Paragraph Planet, and Gone Lawn, and on Substack at @pollywalkerblakemore she publishes a series based on her diary.
Media Contact
Company Name: Literary Titan
Contact Person: Polly Blakemore
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Country: United States
Website: https://substack.com/@pollywalkerblakemore
