Eating Pomegranates: A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters, and the BRCA Gene
*Starred Review* Gabriel shares an estimable gift for memoir and introspection in this forceful account of the breast cancer caused by a potentially fatal inheritance, the BRCA Gene, from her mother and her mother’s mother before her and so on. Even after a prophylactic oophorectomy (surgical removal of the ovaries) to circumvent the cancer associated with the mutated gene, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The mother of two small children and in the prime of life, Gabriel was forced to face, first, her own mortality; second, the reality of how her sickness might affect her children; and third, the unspeakable trial of her body as a battlefield between medicine and cancer. Confronted with a raft of decisions to be made about things no layperson can fully comprehend, she pondered her mother’s death when she, Gabriel, had been a teenager. She has to acknowledge that there are no easy options for her. “Some ethical choices are not free: they are made for us by what has gone before,” she writes, and her story exemplifies that statement as it modulates from harrowing to heroic and back again, to conclude in hopefulness. Raw grace is in evidence here as Gabriel lives to speak to realities to which all too many women can relate. --Donna Chavez