A WORLD OF BOOKS

'What We Have'

Memoir details local family's battle against inherited cancer.

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Sisters Sara, Julie and Amy Boesky — growing up in Metro Detroit in 1965

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Judith Doner Berne

Special to the Jewish News

I is not a disease memoir," says Amy Boesky, the native
Metro Detroiter whose new book What We Have
details her family's battle to pre-empt the hereditary
cancer that kills its women.
"This is really a family book, partly about the genetics,
but mostly about being a daughter, a sister and a mother:'
the Boston University professor explained during an
interview with the Jewish News.
The memoir chronicles a transformative 15 months —
December 1992 through March 1994 — in which Boesky

gave birth to her first child and became pregnant with her
second; her younger sister both lost and gave birth to a
baby; and their mother died.
"The women in my family die young:' writes Boesky,
who spent most of her childhood in Bloomfield Hills.
"For generations — as long as anyone can remember —
they've all died from the same thing. Ovarian cancer."
Her father, Dr. Dale Boesky, M.D., a psychoanalyst
who now lives in Birmingham, "was the vigilante she
explains, staying on top of the medical research in an
effort to keep the women in his family safe.
From an early age, she says, she and her two sisters, Sara
and Julie, knew the drill. "Grow up, have children fast and

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get those things (ovaries) out of you."
And so they thought their mother, Elaine Boesky, was
protected after she had a complete hysterectomy at age 49
that their dad had been urging for years.

What We Didn't Know
Even when Elaine, a high school history teacher at Detroit
Country Day School in Beverly Hills, was diagnosed with
early stage breast cancer at age 53, the daughters regarded
it as "something, but not a fatal something.
"A tiny and curable something instead," Amy writes,
that a lumpectomy and radiation would take care of.
What We Have on page 30

October 28 • 2010

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