Eating Pomegranates
A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters, and the BRCA Gene
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An intensely powerful and moving memoir about genetics, mortality, family, femininity, and the author’s battle with cancer
After the grief of losing her mother to cancer when Sarah Gabriel was a teenager, she had learned to appreciate "the charms of simple happiness." With a career as a journalist, a home in Oxford, England, a husband, and two young daughters, she was content. But then at age forty-four, she was diagnosed with breast cancer—the result of M18T, an inherited mutation on the BRCA1 gene that had taken the lives of her mother and countless female ancestors. Eating Pomegranates is Gabriel’s candid and incredibly intimate story of being forced to acknowledge that while you can try to overcome the loss of a parent, you can never escape your genetic legacy.
Being diagnosed with the same disease that killed her mother compelled Gabriel to write this story. In her struggle for survival, she recounts the rigors of her treatments and considers the impact of a microscopic piece of DNA on generations of her family’s dynamics. She also revisits her past in an effort to reclaim her identity and learn more about the mother who disappeared too early from her life. Beautiful and brutal, Eating Pomegranates—like the myth of Persephone and Demeter, which inspires the title—is about mothers and motherless daughters. It is about a woman so afraid of abandoning her children that she is hardly able to look at them, and about the history of breast cancer itself, from early radical surgeries to contemporary medicine.
Combining passion, humor, fierce intelligence, and clinical detail, Eating Pomegranates is an extraordinary book about an all-too-ordinary disease.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English journalist Gabriel fashions an irreverent and tremendously moving memoir about her family s history of breast and ovarian cancers probably related to the BRCA gene mutation. Having ascertained positively in 2004 that she inherited MI8T, the mutation of the BRCA gene that is normally responsible for the suppression of tumors, the author whose mother died of ovarian cancer at age 42 had her ovaries pre-emptively removed, shutting off harmful estrogen production and precipitating a crash menopause. Two years later, when Gabriel (born in 1961) discovered a lump in her left breast (and only eight months after an all-clear mammogram), she was shocked and angry, especially when doctors apprised her that mammograms detect only 23% of tumors (a suspiciously low figure). The situation can be managed, the doctors placated her, when six tumors were revealed and a bilateral mastectomy along with chemotherapy recommended. Telling her two children and dealing with poignant memories of her own mother s death and her father s suppressed grief are some of the heartbreaking issues Gabriel handles frankly and with grace in this vigorously composed memoir.
