GAYLE FELDMAN - You Don't Have to Be Your Mother. A Breast Cancer Memoir

London England, Hamish Hamilton Limited, 1994. 1st Uk Paperback Edition, Binding: Softcover, Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 0241134390 Trade Paperback While hundreds of thousands of women a year discover that they have breast cancer and millions more are living with the aftermath and uncertainty of the disease, the circumstances of Gayle Feldman's diagnosis were almost uniquely poignant. When still a teenager, she had seen her own mother die tragically young of cancer. The experience devasted her family and coloured and shaped her entire life. She was forty years old and eight months pregnant when she discovered a lump in her left breast. There followed an artificially induced fifty-hour labour and delivery of a healthy son, Benjamin; two biopsies, and a mastectomy - all within two and a half weeks. You Don't Have To Be Your Mother movingly recounts Gayle's experience and remembers that of her mother, but it is also about family and friendship, taking in the generation of her grandmother - who also died young of cancer - and the steadfast support of a loving husband, father and sisters. It is certain to take its place as a classic of the burgeoning movement among women determined to conquer the medical and personal devestations of breast cancer and win back control of their bodies and lives. No one, man or woman, who reads this compelling story will be unmoved by its quiet heroism.