Eating Pomegranates

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 travel journalist, a home in Oxford, England, a husband, and two beautiful daughters, she was content. But then at age forty-four, she was diagnosed with breast cancer - the result of an inherited mutation on the BRCA gene. Eating Pomegranates is Gabriel's candid and incredibly intimate story.

Not only does Gabriel describe her personal experience of losing her mother, but when she herself is diagnosed with the same disease her sudden sense of mortality compels her to write this story. In her struggle for survival, Gabriel 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 own past to learn more about the mother who disappeared too early from her life. Beautiful, brutal, and brave, 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 scared of abandoning her young children that she is hardly able to look at them, about the moments of tenderness that can illuminate her day and thoughtless actions that cause her to crumble, and about the history of breast cancer itself, from early radical surgeries to contemporary medicine.

Combining passion, fierce intelligence, and clinical accuracy, Eating Pomegranates is an extraordinary book about an all-too-ordinary disease.