Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“Irreverent and tremendously moving… Gabriel handles heartbreaking issues frankly and with grace in this vigorously composed memoir.” Publishers Weekly
Review
"In this fiercely emotional memoir, Gabriel blends the story of her personal medical odyssey with the history of the disease." MORE Magazine
Review
“Gabriel tells her story in a bell-clear voice... her fury at curcumstance is aching and voluminous." Kirkus Reviews
Review
“A literary triumph.” Library Journal (Starred Review)
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“A very brave book. Gabriel is an astute writer with a keen eye for the telling detail." The Daily Mail (London)
Review
"To say that Eating Pomegranates is beautifully written is to understate: it has a psalmic quality." The Independent (U.K.)
Synopsis
Full of passion, hope, and despair, this is an extraordinary book about the journey through a devastatingly common disease.
Sarah Gabriel intended to write a novel about relationships. After a troubled, unhappy upbringing that saw the deaths of her mother and aunt, she now had a loving partner and two beautiful children, and finally felt secure in her world. Then, at 43, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she realized that while you can turn your back on your past, you can never escape your genetic legacy.
This is not an account of how to accept the inevitable. It is a fight; a fight to survive, to stay sane, to protect her children from sharing the terrors that kept her awake at night and to stop BRCA1, the rare and deadly genetic mutation that had caused her cancer -- from claiming another victim. It is a book about mothers and about motherless daughters and about love and fear. It is a book that is both beautiful and brutal, revealing how small moments of tenderness can illuminate a day, while a thoughtless action -- a friend turning away for fear misery can be contagious -- can almost break you. But it is also a memoir of breast cancer itself, from its first identification in the nineteenth century through to the founding of a hospital to help sufferers, and the treatments developed to fight it.
Sarah Gabriel's memoir exposes what it means to live in a world where medicine is sophisticated enough to identify the dangers that lie within our genes but not always powerful enough to defuse that danger. Laced with black humour, and full of passion, hope, and despair, this is an extraordinary book about a devastatingly common disease.
From the Hardcover edition.
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.