**I was sent this book to review for free. My opinion is that of my own**
What We Have is a memoir written by Amy Boesky. It is powerful, moving, and its the kind of book that you read through tears. Cancer is something that, unfortunately, runs in my family. It pained to read about the description Amy, the author, gave of her mother because it reminded me of my grandmother. Her frail body of just bones and skin. Her very very thin hair when it used to be so shiny and full. Every little thing, it brought back memories and I.. I couldn’t hold back my tears. I laughed through my tears.
Every time she talked about her Mom, I would think about my Grandmother. A grandmother that once, was full of life, laughter and that sparkle in her eye. It was very hard to keep on reading as Elaine, her mother’s health, deteriorated. It was heartbreaking to read, just as it will be for those who have had a loved one pass away from this dreadful disease that has taken so many people.
Not only does she talk about Cancer, but she talks about previvors. You will read more about it from the excerpt that is posted below. She talks about life, how life is when you have a newborn baby, how her sister lost her baby, Emily. About generations of people in her mother’s family who has died from Ovarian Cancer.
I read this book within a two day span and honestly, I didn’t think I would finish it as soon as I read the word Cancer. The word, although its been three years already, still breaks me. If you do read this book, have tissues at hand. ALWAYS
You can purchase the book here and no, I do not get any money by you purchasing through this link. And I was not paid to link you to that website either. Just recommending this book.
An excerpt from the website:
This story is about what it’s been like for one family—mine—to live with risk.
It isn’t really a cancer story, or a survivor story, though it has cancer and surviving in it. Instead, it’s a previvor’s story. A previvor is someone who doesn’t have cancer, but has a known (elevated) risk for it, discovered through family history or through diagnosis with a genetic mutation. That’s good news. If you’re a previvor, you don’t have anything—at least, not yet.
The bad news is, that means you don’t have anything to fix or get better from. You can diagnose being a previvor, but you can’t treat it. There are things you can do, protocols to follow. But the previvor part doesn’t go away. It just becomes part of who you are.
Previvors are a new group—the word hasn’t been around for long—but we’re growing in number every day. By the time this book is finished, there’ll be thousands more of us. It’s peculiar and compelling, this glimpse ahead—in some ways a curse, in others, a gift.
I used to think all my favorite words began with pre. Preface. Prepare. Prevaricate. Pregnancy (that one doesn’t belong etymologically, but still.) Pre for “prior to; earlier than.” Ahead of. I’ve always loved being early: the first to board the plane; the first to get a new piece of technology. The first to plan. Preview. Premonition. Prevent.
Would I have chosen this kind of preview on purpose?
I go back and forth. I talk about it with my sisters. Some days, the answer, emphatically, is no. Who wants to know his or her genetic destiny and have to live with the consequences? Who wants to sit down and tell her daughters about this? Girls, guess what? We have this gene—
Other days, I’m more upbeat. I tell myself having to live with consequences isn’t the point. It’s getting to live. Maybe even choosing to live. For that, seeing ahead is worth it.
Two different points of view, and I have both.
There’s a shaped poem I’ve always liked by George Herbert which modern editors call “Easter Wings.” Most editors lay it out vertically, so the two stanzas (shaped like triangles) stand, inverted, on a single page. Set like that, it looks like an hourglass. But if you turn the poem sideways, it looks like wings.
That’s how it is for me, thinking about the future. Two different shapes. One holding time, the other escaping it. One suggesting fragility, confinement; the other, something transcendent. Turn it one way, you see an hourglass. Turn it the other way, and you see wings.
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