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Barbara, age 4, and her father at Asbury Park Beach
Melted Away
A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru
An American climate journalist abroad goes on an unexpected journey of healing and forgiveness when her estranged father with dementia arrives at her doorstep in Peru.
As a prolific child poet, Barbara Drake-Vera loved writing almost as much as she adored her father, a moody postal worker with an elaborate comb-over and a fondness for Mahler. But when her successes sparked his rage, Barbara silenced her voice for years, terrified even to see her name in print. By age forty-nine, she was a professional journalist living in Peru and collaborating with her husband, a Peruvian-born photographer, to report on melting glaciers in the Andes, far from the reach of her father.
Melted Away recounts the story of what happens when, after her father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Barbara takes him into her home in the desert city of Lima and begins a process of self-discovery that uncovers a path toward personal and family healing. Aiding her on this quest is a diverse group of allies: a trio of caregiving women from the provinces who work as home-health aides; a mischievous, Cervantes-quoting, nonagenarian suitor; and a stubborn alpaca herder who lives beneath a massive, life-sustaining Andean glacier—worshipped since pre-Incan times—now melting from rapid climate change.
Candid, poignant, and deeply researched, Melted Away is the true story of how a writer at midlife reclaims her own agency, and an ardent plea to care for the planet by embracing collectivism and mutual aid.
Featuring photographs of the indigenous glacier pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i (“Shining Snow Star” in Quechua) by Jorge Vera and time-lapse documentation of the glacier’s recession by the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center/Ohio State University.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Sarton Women’s Book Award, by Story Circle Network. Story Circle notes that “Sarton memoirs, novels, and nonfiction books are distinguished by the compelling ways they honor the lives of women and girls and are limited to books published by independent authors and publishers.”
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Praise for Melted Away
“From the New Jersey suburbs to the rapidly disappearing glaciers of the Peruvian Andes, Barbara Drake-Vera takes us on a personal journey of discovery. With her adept storytelling and brutally honest introspection, she helps humanize the pain of the unfolding climate crisis.”
— Michael E. Mann, author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
“A brave story of grief, both for what we’re losing to the climate crisis and for what we stand to lose – each other.”
—Brianna Craft, author of Everything That Rises: A Climate Change Memoir
“Drake-Vera’s wonderful memoir scales both the Andes and the towering mystery of how to care for an unlovable father. Melted Away is about compassion, for both a declining father and a failing environment.”
—Jill Ciment, author of Consent and The Body in Question
“An exquisite blend of memoir and environmental reporting from the precipice of the climate crisis. Barbara Drake-Vera’s braided stories of caregiving and climate change in Peru evoke Barry Lopez in witness to trauma in childhood, in a vanishing glacier, and among the Andean people mortally and spiritually reliant on its melting ice. Her writing luminesces like that blue glacier through to the last, perfect words.”
—Cynthia Barnett, author of The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans
Barbara, age 4, and her father at Asbury Park Beach