What We Have: A Memoir

Just imagine what it would feel like to be born and grow up female, knowing full well that no woman in your family has lived past age 45 due to cancer.

Amy Boesky and her sisters knew they would someday have to face difficult decisions. As they went about their young lives, they felt the urgency to hurry up, get married, and have children. Before it was too late.

They were advised by their doctors to not wait past age 35 to have preventative surgery. So Amy had not only her own life to consider, but then the worry that comes from knowing your sisters face the very same curse. And then there's her mother's fate as well.

It made me really think about genetic predispositions and traits. Precursors of health woes. And how this figures into our destiny as humans. And in this particular case, women.

Amy writes: "Later, looking back, I sometimes played a terrible game with myself, trying to decide which goodbye was hardest. There were so many of them, layered on top of each other, and each seemed more difficult than the others. It was like listening to music that reached a crescendo only to build and build until you were certain you couldn't bear it anymore."

Amy weaves back and forth from the past to the present in her quest to achieve her goals in the face of such frightening uncertainty. Her memoir reads much like a novel, as the cover attests.

This book is about being afraid at an early age. It is about changing what you can, and then hopefully living a full life despite what you cannot. 

Amy Boesky has degrees from both Harvard and Oxford, and has written several books for children and young adults. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters. And is an associate professor of English at Boston College.