What We Have
A Family’s Inspiring Story About Love, Loss, and Survival
by Amy Boesky

List Price: $26.00
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781592405510
Publisher: Gotham

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

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Q: What influenced you to write the book now, fifteen years after your mother’s death?

A: Now that my daughters are growing up --- Sacha is 18, and Libby 16 --- the questions about genetic testing have been opened up for me again in an intensely personal way. Moreover, I’ve started to meet undergraduates who are dealing with these questions. As I’ve watched this new generation face this decision, I felt the need to share my story.

Q: Your academic work has included significant research on timepieces and the evolution of human concepts of time. How much of your decision to follow this line of study was driven by a sense that your personal biological clock is always ticking?

A: There’s no question that my interest in time derives from a deeply familial sense of urgency. The clock on the front cover of What We Have is modeled on a clock that hung in our upstairs hallway when we were children. Sometimes I can still hear the sound of that clock ticking…And on the other hand, my research helped me to understand that this obsession with time is profoundly human. Our culture is facing new challenges in charting the human timeline, but other cultures (and other time periods) have struggled with these questions as well.

Q: Are there ways in which you wish your parents dealt with your family’s tragic legacy differently? Is a little knowledge a dangerous thing?

A: The mantra these days is almost always the same: “knowledge is power.” As someone who has benefited enormously from medical research, I have to concur. I meet women all the time who never knew that their families carried one of the BRCA genes. Do I wish I could have been raised innocent of the knowledge that we carried a risk for cancer? Often, I do. But at the same time, I feel that knowledge has shaped me, helped me to make the choices I’ve made. In the end, knowing --- and fearing --- are as much a part of me as are my genes.

Q: As a writer and a professor of English literature, how --- if at all --- do you think the language of medicine affects the layman’s experience of particular conditions and treatments? I’m thinking specifically of your own “inhospitable womb” and your mother’s “F U” chemo course.

A: I am deeply interested in this question. Words (and narratives) carry enormous weight. As an English professor, I spend most of my time concentrating on details. Why did Donne choose this verb, that image? Why is a novel framed the way it is? I suppose that makes me especially sensitive to the shaping power of medical narratives. The medical field is changing today, and I think doctors --- the best doctors, anyway --- are increasingly sensitive to the ways in which patients need to become part of their own stories, to be respected. But there’s no question that I’ve witnessed firsthand the consequences of what happens when human beings are turned into “patients”. And yes, I think anger about that experience definitely comes into this book.

Q: After an initial outburst of anger, you never mention any feelings of resentment towards Dr. Kempf, your mother’s doctor who advised against further testing after her lumpectomy. Do you blame him or was it simply the fates whom you so often invoke?

A: I blame all of us for not doing more. My mother received “standard of care” at the time. Today, she would have been treated more aggressively at the time of diagnosis. I remember fighting with her on the phone about her reluctance to pursue a second opinion, to consider chemotherapy. Do I blame myself for not pushing harder? Yes. Do I blame her for being unwilling to consider more aggressive treatment at the start, when it may have made a difference? Yes. The old Kubler-Ross idea that anger is only a phase in grief is too simplistic. You never stop being angry. But my rational side understands that in the end, she probably would have died anyway, no matter what we did. This was a terribly aggressive cancer.

Q: What do you think about the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force’s recent recommendation that women wait until they are fifty before undergoing screening mammograms?

A: I think part of the power of memoir is to counter the weight of statistics. I believe in maintaining early annual screening for all women, and for BRCA1 and BRCA2 families, screening should begin at an earlier age. We should focus research dollars to improve diagnostics, but that doesn’t mean we should drop the tools we have.

Q: How have you prepared your daughters --- emotionally, physically --- for the possibility of these hereditary cancers?

A: We talk. They’ve read the book. They’re young, but they’ve had to face more than their share of medical issues in their lives already, and I think they are both extremely resilient. And of course, they have Jacques in all of this as well as me.

Q: Are there other books about cancer or death and dying that helped you during the grieving process?

A: Hope Edelman’s book (Motherless Daughters) made a big impact on me --- interestingly, because it helped me to understand my mother’s life a bit more clearly. My mother was so young when she lost Sylvia…I love Kelly Corrigan’s The Middle Place and Meredith Norton’s Lopsided, both of them stark, funny, honest accounts of dealing with cancer while raising young children. David Eggers’ brilliant (elegiac) memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is one of my favorite books to read and teach. In its brilliant rearrangement of generic form, I find Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index astonishing. And then, strangely, it’s often texts that appear to be about something else entirely that are the ones that really get to me. The poetry of Bishop, Heaney, Olds…

Q: In your account of the naming ceremony for your second daughter, Elisabeth, you write “maybe it isn’t completely true to say I don’t believe in God. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t found the story yet that makes sense to me.” Have you found that story yet?

A: I’ll sound like an unabashed humanist, but I think for me, the closest approximation to a ‘shaping narrative’ comes through art and language. Maybe that’s another version of “what we have” --- words, that we shape and reshape --- stories that we tell about each other and pass down. That’s a kind of immortality, I suppose. Q: What’s been happening with your family since the close of the book?

A: We still live in the house we found after so much searching. The girls took their first steps here, had countless birthday parties, grew from dolls to books to bikes to the miraculous complicated experiences of young adulthood. We’ve celebrated wonderful times and faced enormous challenges in this house, including medical problems outside the purview of my own family history. Last Christmas, my sisters and I and five out of the six grandchildren (Rachel is overseas with the Peace Corps) flew down to Central America to celebrate my father’s eightieth birthday. His adoring wife, Judy, helped to make this celebration possible, bringing as much joy to it as she does to so much else in their shared lives. Was my mother there, in some sense? Even after all this time has elapsed, she is still with us, I think. Every glass we lift or toast we make, her name is lingering, just a syllable away. The hardest part for me about writing this book was recreating the power of her hold on us all, and the cost of losing her. But I think that is what I hoped for in the end --- that writing the book would help to keep her alive.

Q: What part of the story do you think your mother would have liked most?

A: She would’ve liked the parts that made her laugh. It’s funny, my sisters and I have talked about this, whether or not she would’ve liked the fact that I’ve written about her. She was so intensely private. But I remember once she closed a book that she’d been reading --- it was James Agee’s A Death in the Family --- and she said, in that crisp, “I’m coming to a conclusion” way that she had, “Now, that’s an amazing thing for a writer to do --- to write that kind of tribute for someone who’s died.” So maybe she’d forgive me for exposing so much, if it brought back some of who she was, and what she gave us all.

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