My Mother's Breast: Daughters Face Their Mothers' Cancer

by Laurie Tarkan

Overview

Focusing on the unique psychological needs of women who must deal with the pain and devastation of a mother's breast cancer while repressing their fears for their own health, Tarkan profiles a wide range of women who have witnessed the effects of breast cancer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461600282
Publisher:	Taylor Trade Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

What People are Saying About This

Randy Gross

[My Mother's Breast] is a well-written testament to the anxieties, emotions, and issues that these women experience. Also, the content regarding risk is thorough, clear, and accurate, which makes it a great resource for women at high risk for the development of breast cancer.

I have been working with this population of women for several years, and always struggled to find good information...Futhermore, how to address the emotional and psychosocial piece of their situation remains a challenge for clinicians, so we have decided to use your book as a reference for the patients in our Special Surveillance Breast Program here at Memorial [Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center]...to provide it to our participants who we feel will benefit, as it most definitely will be helpful to many women. I appreciate your contribution to these women through your writing.
— (Randy Gross MS, RN, CS, AOCN, Clinical Nurse Specialist, Special Surveillance Breast Program, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center)

Editorial Reviews

At 22, Sunshine London left her carefree life as a college student, model and surfer girl in Santa Barbara, Calif., and moved home to Las Vegas to take on the biggest responsibility of her life - nursing her mother, who had breast cancer, and caring for her five younger siblings...The story is one of more than a dozen told of daughters dealing with their mothers' cancer in an inspiring new book for the daughters of women with breast cancer.

For the 180,000 women found to have breast cancer each year, the news changes not only their own lives, but also the lives of the loved ones who support them, and often grieve for them, author Laurie Tarkan points out. Daughters, in particular, face the sobering reality of their mothers' disease and treatment as well as fear and anxiety over the possibility that they may face a similar future themselves. -- ( Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, 4/27/99 )

Carolyn Poirot

Award-winning journalist Tarkan (Self, McCall's) tries here to help daughters of women diagnosed with breast cancer deal with the changes that come with their mother's illness or death, changes that can affect an already fragile mother/daughter relationship. Her book is split into two parts. Part 1 Features 16 women whose stories, divided into subject-related chapters, encompass the mother/daughter scenario...Part 2 discusses stratagems for daughters who fear their own illness and mortality and stresses the basics of early detection, getting all available information on treatments and therapies, and coping...A secondary purchase for psychotherapists, social workers, and counselors of women with breast cancer and their families and for larger public libraries and inclusive patient-health/psychology collections. -- ( Library Journal, 4/15/99 )

Bette-Lee Fox

When breast cancer strikes, attention invariably turns to the patient. It's easy to forget, thought, that people closest to the patient-parents, spouses, children, other relatives and care-givers - can also suffer greatly from the disease's effects. Laurie Tarkan, who, as a pre-teen, lost her mother to a rare liver disorder, first began to understand the toll breast cancer takes on daughters whose mothers who are stricken with it while researching an article for Self magazine. "I heard they were undergoing a lot of anxiety and stress and just having real difficulty with the situation," says Tarkan, the New York author of My Mother's Breast: Daughters Face Their Mothers' Cancer, which charts the courses of 10 women dealing with their mother's breast cancer. "I think because they're not actually patients themselves, they get overlooked," she says. -- ( Las Vegas Sun, 5/3/99 )

Lisa Ferguson

Just because you have a family history of breast and ovarian cancer, that does not mean you will inherit on of the gene mutations that make women more susceptible to these diseases. Still, for many women, that news offers little consolation. In the new book, My Mother's Breast: Daughters Face Their Mothers' Cancer, magazine writer Laurie Tarkan looks at the unique psychological needs of daughters dealing with the pain of their mothers' breast cancer and their own health risks. -- ( Dallas Morning News, 4/19/99 )

Helen Bond

Award-winning journalist Tarkan (Self, McCalls) tries here to help daughters of women diagnosed with breast cancer deal with the changes that come with their mothers illness or death, changes that can affect an already fragile mother/daughter relationship. Her book is split into two parts. Part 1 features 16 women whose stories, divided into subject-related chapters (e.g., Mothering Mom, Adolescent Angst, Depression and Fear), encompass the mother/daughter breast cancer scenario. Clinical commentary from professionals makes these accounts less compelling and less cathartic than many cancer narratives; readers will more readily identify with Gayle Feldmans You Dont Have To Be Your Mother (LJ 2/15/94). Part 2 discusses stratagems for daughters who fear their own illness and mortality and stresses the basics of early detection, getting all available information on treatments and therapies, and coping. This second section is informative, but whole books on the subject (e.g., Joseph Keons The Truth About Breast Cancer: A 7-Step Prevention Plan, LJ 10/15/98) are more so. A secondary purchase for psychotherapists, social workers, and counselors of women with breast cancer and their families and for larger public libraries and inclusive patient-health/psychology collections.Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Library Journal