It’s not that unusual for an elder law attorney to publish a book for consumers, but what about one whose spouse has also published on the same general topic and been inspired by the same clients?
Los Angeles ElderLawAnswers member Susan B. Geffen is the author of the 2012 book, “Take That Nursing Home and Shove It!: How to Secure an Independent Future for Yourself and Your Loved Ones.” Geffen says that her work with clients compelled her to write the hard-hitting volume.
It was interactions with some of those same clients that provided the impetus for her husband, Joel Geffen’s, new novel, “The Ombudsman,” about a retired widower who becomes an advocate for the elderly in a local nursing home.
In addition to being a lawyer, Susan Geffen has a master’s degree in gerontology from the University of Southern California. Her master’s thesis on neglect and abuse in nursing homes was the genesis for her book, which took two and a half years to write and was greatly informed by her work as an elder law attorney.
“As I got more involved in the industry and had more of an opportunity from a practical perspective to see what was going on, I became very impassioned and enraged, and this is how it came out of me,” Geffen told ElderLawAnswers. “It was truly something that I had to write.”
The book helps readers age in place successfully and supports the proposition that nursing homes are “terrible places,” in Geffen’s words. She decries the bottom-line orientation of many for-profit facilities that answer to shareholders: “I think having shareholders when it comes to being responsible for another person’s care, I think that’s such a conflict of interest and I just don’t think it can ever be done well under those circumstances.”
Geffen says that her husband’s novel also came out of her work with clients “through osmosis.” Joel Geffen did a lot of the intake in his wife’s practice, and in the process he heard fact patterns “that [would] eat away at him,” Susan Geffen says. Because he was not an attorney, she says, he had to listen to heartbreaking fact patterns and not be able to help people when he felt their pain. "This is the way it came out for him.”
According to “The Ombudsman’s” book-jacket copy, the title character’s “quest to find his place in the world will shake him to his core and challenge the self-image he always believed was indestructible.” Joel Geffen has since become the owner of 1 Heart Caregiver Services, which matches up those in the area in need of home care with a caregiver.
Interestingly, Susan Geffen says that she and Joel don’t collaborate on the writing of each other’s books or even read each other’s drafts. “He had his own professional editors and so did I,” she says.
Both “The Ombudsman” and “Take That Nursing Home and Shove It!” are published by the Geffens’ own corporation, Sage Press. Susan Geffen says she has started another book for consumers and she already has another catchy title for it: “How to Get Rich Off Your Parents: Elder Abuse in the 21st Century.”
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