Craft Blog - Michelle Tamara Cutler

Big Daughter is an interactive storytelling project for adult children caring for aging parents created by award-winning screenwriter and storytelling coach Michelle Tamara Cutler.

Does caring for an aging parent require losing control of your own life in the process?

big daughter

I Won't Let You Die Alone

big daughter presents:

With the narrative intimacy of memoir and the rigor of reported nonfiction, Michelle Tamara Cutler, award-winning screenwriter and storytelling coach, confronted this familiar midlife warning when her aging, single mother decided she didn’t want to die in the United States. Determined that her mother would not face the end of her life alone, Cutler upended her career and relationship to follow her abroad. The book blends Cutler’s lived experience as a primary caregiver in Spain with wider research on how families, professionals, and societies are defining what it means to age and die in the 21st century.

By Michelle Tamara Cutler
Forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield / Bloomsbury USA

“This [book] is extraordinary. The culmination of a lot of thought, energy, and honesty brought into play through a beautiful, sensitive rendering of personal experience. I’m just so pleased there is enough left in me to inspire my daughter.”

- Barbara Gillette Price (87), artist & mother

About the author

Hey, I'm Michelle.

Michelle Tamara Cutler is an award-winning screenwriter, storytelling coach, and developmental editor specializing in memoir, true story adaptation, and research-driven nonfiction.

For more than a decade, she has helped writers, filmmakers, brands, and everyday people shape complicated life experiences into engaging stories. Her writing has appeared across literary, editorial, craft, and commercial publications.

As her own life became increasingly shaped by caring for her aging mother, Michelle began exploring the larger emotional and cultural realities facing adult children caring for aging parents in the 21st century.

BIG DAUGHTER grows out of this experience: an interactive storytelling project rooted in the belief that sharing honest stories helps us feel less isolated during one of the most transformative periods of adult life.

She is the author of the forthcoming book I WON’T LET YOU DIE ALONE from Rowman & Littlefield / Bloomsbury USA.

consult with michelle

The story of big daughter

BIG DAUGHTER grows out of Michelle’s longstanding interest in storytelling as a way to connect people through sharing lived experience. Building on the philosophy of earlier interactive projects, BIG DAUGHTER invites honest reflection from people navigating the emotional and practical realities of caring for aging parents, while making room for complexity, contradiction, humor, grief, love, and uncertainty.