Catherine Simpson for Sandwiched: Caring Up and Caring Down

Catherine Simpson is a novelist, journalist, poet and short story writer based in Edinburgh. Her memoir One Body was published in 2022, and selected for World Book Night in 2023. This followed her memoir When I Had a Little Sister, published great critical acclaim. Her debut novel Truestory won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Her work has been published in various anthologies and magazines, published online and broadcast on BBC Radio.

Catherine Simpson believed the hardest chapters of her life were behind her. She had raised two children - one of them autistic - and survived both a family suicide and her own cancer treatment. In her fifties, it was time to enjoy restoring her health, reducing work commitments, hanging out with friends and relaxing with her husband in their empty nest.

But when the global pandemic shut the world down, Catherine's nonagenarian father's independence began to slip away just as her adult daughter's mental health spiralled into crisis.

Sandwiched is a candid memoir about being trapped in a high-pressure, intergenerational squeeze. It is a story of letting go of the superwoman myth, confronting the limits of control and responsibility, and trying to hold it all together while providing loving care.