This book is an account of an extraordinary relationship between Ruth Ray, a 42-year-old academic, and Paul Mason, an 82-year-old resident of a nursing home. It began as follows:

Ruth Ray decided to see where her feelings might lead. She visited Bedford Continuing Care to research creative writing's therapeutic efficacy for older people stressed by relocation. She is filled with ideals of radical gerontology and feminist ethics. He is busy resisting the lethargy of care-home routine and the debilitation of Parkinson's disease. Ray's research conclusions prove disappointing, finding no statistical difference between residents who participated in writing groups and those who did not, but a far more interesting experiment began to unfold. The gripping nature of Ruth and Paul's relationship reflects its taboo. For an academic reader, this is partly because Ruth seems to have blurred the boundaries, becoming fascinated by a frail, adoring old man who gives her the ultimate insider look at a community of intense professional interest to her. But the physical detail of their affair is more unsettling. She is frank about his incontinence, his shakes and memory loss, eye-patch and frequent inability to shave, dress or even walk. She also captures their mutual joy. Paul got lucky; she got a tender, flirtatious, funny man, who swept away the bad memories of her previous boyfriend. The book's title is misleading, for the narrative far from being ‘notes’ is a gorgeously written love story, topsy-turvily showing a strong, smart woman finding her man (and he is neither rich nor foolish) locked up and waiting.

Though this is a deeply personal book, which Ray says she took 10 years to write, it is not an autobiography but a ‘narrative for social change’ and is fully informed by the work of gerontologists such as Robert L. Kane, Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Margaret Cruikshank, as well as narrative theorists such as Thomas Cole and Jerome Bruner. The chapter titles give a sense of how she uses her story to get at the issues, from the theoretical frames of ‘Passionate scholarship’ and ‘Ethics of care’ to residents' struggles in ‘Home’, ‘Making ourselves understood’, ‘Those little ordinary things’, ‘Diaper is a dirty word’, and ‘Empty rooms’. In ‘Care conference’, for example, she explores the classic problem of carers' versus dependants' rights through a restaurant scene where Paul suddenly announces to his son and daughter-in-law that he wants to leave the home to live with his ‘one-of-a-kind woman’. Ray reconstructs the conversation alongside her rather panicked inner thoughts, even as she understands exactly why Paul would rather live ‘a normal life in a real home’, or eat spare ribs instead of ‘heavy, wet mounds’ of food.

Alongside telling us how their relationship grew to its natural, loving end, Ray enumerates some very practical suggestions for improving the care of older people. These include allowing the residents of homes to personalise their environments, to enjoy more privacy (as for love-making), to control their diet, be protected from theft, have their sexuality recognised and also, more complicatedly, express their gender identity, especially where men are in a minority. Ray cites The Pioneer Network, a grassroots organisation in the nursing home reform movement, as a reference for where we should be going. Endnotes will undoubtedly make it onto many academic syllabi in age studies, but it should also gain a wider audience as literary life writing. In the tradition of May Sarton's diaries, June Arnold's Sister Gin, Carolyn Heilbrun's The Last Gift of Time, and Jane Juska's A Round-Heeled Woman, it is a riveting reminder of what happens when a feminist refigures the politics of sex, age and death.