Amy Boesky's memoir is the story of a woman dealing with a family legacy of cancer.

In What We Have: One Family's Inspiring Story About Love, Loss and Survival, Amy Boesky shares a transformative year of joy, laughter and grief.

At thirty-two, Amy Boesky had it all: a wonderful new man in her life, a great job, and the (nearly) perfect home. For once, she was almost able to shake the terrible fear that had gripped her for as long as she could remember.

Women in her family had always died young-from cancer-and she and her sisters were previvors growing up in time's shadow. But rather than dwelling on fear, Amy wanted to plan for a new baby and live her life. In What We Have, Amy shares a transformative year in her family's life and invites readers to join in their joy, laughter, and grief.

CommitmentNow.com:  What We Have: One Family’s Inspiring Story About Love, Loss and Survival, is a memoir of your life – your marriage, motherhood, career – all with a backdrop of the uncertainty of cancer, which has afflicted generations of women in your family.  What inspired you to tell your story, and that of your family, at this point in your life?

Amy Boesky:  What We Have took many years to write. In part, I think this is because for a long time I was too close to my mother’s death to feel that I had garnered the necessary distance to tell her story—our story—with any degree of objectivity. But I was also keenly aware that a candid discussion of genetic testing, preventative surgery, and the weight of living with heightened risk for cancer is something that would impact my daughters as well as my sisters and me. I was consciously aware of waiting until my daughters were old enough—in their late teens—to talk about the choice to publish this book. At the same time, it’s clear to me that their own growth has exposed the extent to which the choices my sisters and I made are by no means over and done with. Now, there’s a new generation facing these choices, and in part this compelled me to tell this story.

CommitmentNow.com:  In What We Have, you struggle with the decision of whether or not to be tested for BRCA 1 and BRCA 2.  What are BRCA 1 and BRCA 2, and what is the significance of such tests?

Amy:  BRCA1 and 2 are mutations on a tumor-suppressing gene that, when working properly, helps to inhibit the growth of certain cancers. If you inherit one or more mutation on the BRCA gene, you face a considerably higher risk of developing certain cancers—most notably, breast and ovarian. My family has inherited the BRCA1 mutation. This entails a much higher incidence of breast cancer (up to 85% over a lifetime) and ovarian cancer  (up to 50% risk over a lifetime). My choice, facing the likelihood of having inherited this mutation, was to have preventative surgery.

CommitmentNow.com:  You have two young daughters.  How do you think a mother can prepare her children for the possibility of hereditary cancers?

Amy:  I think, as with so many of the vexed issues that come with being a parent, that there is no easy, one-size-fits-all answer to this question. I’m a full disclosure kind of person—I fully believe in being honest with my daughters, and I always have believed that. And at the same time (and you can tell I’m in the field of education here!) I believe in being responsible to what is developmentally appropriate. What’s okay for an eighteen year old to hear and talk about wouldn’t be right for an eight year old. Moreover, what’s right in one family will not be right in another. But I do think it’s helpful to think hard about protecting the individual liberties of children (their own right to make choices about what they know about their bodies, and when), and to temper the inherent caution of parenthood. I’ve always tried to approach the subject of BRCA1 in the spirit of “look how much we can do,” rather than with gloom and fatalism. Having said this, there are genetic diseases about which we can (at least at present) do very little. This makes it hard to generalize, and more important than ever to be respectful of individual families, the issues they face, and the choices they make about how to face them.

CommitmentNow.com:  Despite your family legacy and the sadness you experience, What We Have is optimistic.  Your love of life, and affection for your family shine through your story.  Was this a difficult book to write?

Amy:  Yes and no. The most joyous parts for me came with re-animating memories. My mother, of course, but also other lost “selves”—my sisters and I in younger versions; my daughters as babies. What I wasn’t fully prepared for was how hard it would be, in the process of writing and revising, to experience again the pain of losing my mother.

And yet, I’ve been surprised—and gladdened—by how often people tell me that they find the book funny, or “uplifting,” or that the “have” in the title has felt to them like something positive, rather than something grim. Yes, we have this mutation that we’ve passed down, and that’s a hard thing. It’s difficult to be connected back through generations to loss. But that’s part of what life is—and there is so much more that my mother passed down to us than this tiny mutation. Her love of travel, of history, of reading, of children. . . the list goes on and on. I wouldn’t give one bit of that up.

CommitmentNow.com:  What’s been happening with your family since the close of your book?

Amy:  Ah ha—read the next installment! That’s only partly a joke; I keep toying with the idea of writing another book about some important experiences that we went through as a family when the girls were five and eight. But I can at least catch you up to the present: my sisters and I are well, and our kids have all become young adults. The older cousins are out in the world doing wonderful things; my older daughter is in college and my younger one getting ready to finish high school. My father remarried a wonderful woman who is as different from my mother as possible, and yet has somehow managed to make my father as happy, in different ways, as my mother did.
It doesn’t feel so long ago, though. And it’s striking. Every occasion—each birthday, graduation, or important event—each first—we think about my mother. It will just be like I’m getting farther and farther away, she said once, talking candidly with my sisters and me about what it would be like when she died.
But she doesn’t get farther away. She’s always almost just here—as if, at any minute, the phone might ring, and I’d pick up, and hers would be the voice I’d hear. Full of life and laughter and bossy instructions and juicy gossip, like she’d just been in the next room, waiting for all these years to catch up.

A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, Amy Boesky is an associate professor of English at Boston College. She was one of the principal ghostwriters for the bestselling young adult series "Sweet Valley High". She lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two daughters. 

To purchase What We Have, click here.