The Room They Gave Me
A Memoir of Care
At twenty-three, Dina Paul arrives at her grandparents’ Central Park West apartment with one suitcase, planning to stay for the summer. They have cleared a room, folded a towel on the bed, made space in the bathroom, and prepared food. Having supported herself since adolescence, she discovers what it means to be expected. The summer becomes seven years.
Paul takes that understanding into the home she makes for her son and into the rooms she enters as a social worker. She is often the person with the file, turning what she sees and hears into a record others will act on. A supervisor asks, “What do we know?” She learns to make the strength of her language match the strength of the facts. Years later, she asks a younger clinician the same question.
Late in her career, Paul counsels Buddy, a former mechanic her own age, in a nursing-home janitor’s closet. His speech comes slowly, and she learns not to finish his words. Week after week, she comes to know him through the work his hands remember and the songs he still knows. She waits for each answer. Her permission to be there comes from a contract neither of them controls.
THE ROOM THEY GAVE ME is an unsentimental literary memoir about the material work of caring for other people and the limits institutions place around that work. It asks what remains when the room closes.
It is a book for readers of literary memoir, and for the people on both sides of these rooms: social workers and social work students, for whom its questions of ethics and record are daily practice; nurses, aides, and foster parents; and patients and their families, who know the same rooms from the other chair.
Early responses to the manuscript
“Captivating from the beginning. She exposes the officious, bureaucratic nature of modern health care and answers it with a genuine understanding and compassion that made me love her clients. For social workers, aspiring social workers, and anyone in health care, this is a must-read.”
—Jeffery E. Heck, MD, Professor of Family Medicine, University of North Carolina; Emeritus CEO and Dean, Mountain Area Health Education Center, Asheville
“Ms. Paul beautifully captures what it means for seemingly lost lives to be found. This memoir, more than anything, chronicles the journey of belonging. The tender insight of her storytelling took my breath away again and again.”
—Bruce Kelly, MD, retired Assistant Chief of Primary Care at the Charles George VA Medical Center, Asheville, where he co-founded, with former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti, a writing program for veterans
“Residents’ rights are written on a poster in every nursing home. This book is about the difference between the poster and the room. I spent decades in these buildings, and I kept waiting for the false note — the uplift, the villain, the easy answer. It never comes. It is the first book I’d give to a new aide, a new ombudsman, or a frightened family.”
—Barbara Anne Mercier, retired after thirty-three years as a recreational therapist and supervisor in nursing homes; twelve years a volunteer long-term care ombudsman in New Mexico
Names and identifying details of clients, patients, and residents have been changed. Flora Colao, MSW, LCSW, founder of the Children’s Safety Project at Greenwich House, appears under her own name with her permission.
Inquiries: dina@dinapaul.com · Mailing list
