Eating Pomegranates: A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters, and the BRCA Gene - Hardcover

Gabriel, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439148198 ISBN 13: 9781439148198

Publisher: Scribner, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Remarkable, uncompromising and full of intelligence and insight. Gabriel has done a great service in probing social attitudes and in describing the intricate, often unspoken negotiations between the sick and the well."

Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author of "Wolf Hall"

"Gabriel writes with stunning precision. Her fear and bravery is palpable."

Robin Romm, author of "The Mercy Papers"

"Vivid and tense, at once raw and stylish, "Eating Pomegranates" brings the reader very close--for some readers unbearably close--to reality . . . devastatingly intimate."

John Carey, author of "What Good Are the Arts?"

"A literary triumph." "Library Journal "(Starred Review)

"Gabriel shares an estimable gift for memoir and introspection in this forceful account... Raw grace is in evidence here as Gabriel lives to speak to realities to which all too many women can relate." "Booklist "(Starred Review)

"Irreverent and tremendously moving... Gabriel handles heartbreaking issues frankly and with grace in this vigorously composed memoir." "Publishers Weekly"

"Gabriel tells her story in a bell-clear voice... her fury at curcumstance is aching and voluminous." "Kirkus Reviews"

"In this fiercely emotional memoir, Gabriel blends the story of her personal medical odyssey with the history of the disease." "MORE Magazine"

"A very brave book. Gabriel is an astute writer with a keen eye for the telling detail." "The Daily Mail (London)"

"To say that "Eating Pomegranates" is beautifully written is to understate: it has a psalmic quality." "The Independent (U.K.)"

About the Author:

Sarah Gabriel is journalist who has written for such British publications as The Independent, The Guardian, and The Sunday Times. Married with two daughters, she lives in Oxford, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1439148198
• ISBN 13: 9781439148198
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 259