Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir

Caring for Red is Mindy Fried’s moving and colorful account of caring for her ninety-seven-year-old father, Manny—an actor, writer, and labor organizer—in the final year of his life. This memoir chronicles the actions of two sisters as they discover concentric circles of support for their father and attempt to provide him with an experience of “engaged aging” in an assisted living facility.

The story is also that of a daughter of a powerful and outspoken man who took risks throughout his life and whose political beliefs had an enduring impact on his family. (After Manny was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was blacklisted and his family was shunned.)

As an actor, Manny was affiliated with Elia Kazan’s Group Theatre and the Federal Theatre Project. He did Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen, and played everything from the tormented father in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons to an infant in a baby carriage in Thornton Wilder’s Infancy, from the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof to—poignantly for this book—the role of Morrie in Tuesdays with Morrie.

As she devotes herself to caring for her dying father, Mindy grapples anew with the complexity of their relationship. She questions whether she can be there for him and how to assert her own voice as her father's caregiver in his last days.

My father’s legacy… (Mindy’s Muses, March 2, 2011)

Radical Connections: A Profile of Engaged Aging (Mindy’s Muses, January 23, 2012)

An Act of Love by Mindy Fried (February 1, 2015)

Gayle Sulik interviews Mindy about her new book, Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir by Mindy Fried (June 10, 2016)

Growing up with and caring for Manny Fried by Mark Sommer, Buffalo News, Gusto section, November 14, 2016

Blacklisted father taught her a lesson on integrity by Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe, January 27, 2017

Special Bread And Roses - Reading of Mindy Fried’s “Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir”
Busboys and Poets, Takoma Park, MD, October 25, 2016, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Linn Shapiro, Mindy Fried, Ralph Dumain