Not Exactly What I Had in Mind: An Incurable Love Story

by Rosemary Breslin

Overview

One week in 1989, Rosemary Breslin got a headache that wouldn't go away. After countless tests and treatments, doctors knew little about her strange disease except that it wasn't AIDS or cancer. Two years later, out of a job, in debt, and worried about insurance, Rosemary was invited out by friends--not knowing this would be the night she met her future husband. This is one woman's story about having a real life while facing the question of how long she might live. Serialized in Self magazine. 208 pp. National ads. Author tour. 40,000 print.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812992281
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/04/1997
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rosemary Breslin was a journalist and screenwriter. She worked at The New York Times, Newsday, and the New York Daily News. Her articles appeared in Elle, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, and New Republic. The author of Not Exactly What I Had in Mind: An Incurable Love Story, Breslin died in 2004.

Read an Excerpt

The Present
 
I think I found my husband’s next wife. Since we bought this tiny cottage in the country a few months back I’d been in search of a good breakfast place that opens early. Much as I love diners and beat-up coffee shops, the coffee never has a good kick and the muffins almost always have the consistency of paperweights. I found a great one that serves thick, strong coffee and light, fresh muffins. As I stood on line to order, I immediately turned my eye to the women who run the place. Standing together, they were good-looking, hardworking, hip. They could handle things.
 
Of the two, Ann’s the one I chose on the spot. I first saw her at the grill, in the early morning rush of farmers and truckers and laborers and newcomers like me, second-home owners from the big city, and she was great to watch. Thin, muscular, hair loosely pulled back, up before four but still looking great as she fills the orders with great efficiency, cutting off slabs of fresh cinnamon bread or flipping orders of thick hash browns.
 
Ann and I hit it off immediately. We started out the usual way. A smile. A nod of recognition. A wave good-bye after I paid for my papers and order. Then we got to talking. I told her I’d just bought my house and she told me she had been a biochemist in Washington, D.C., who had been lured back to her hometown by her sister, who had taken over a convenience store and turned it into this breakfast place.
 
Soon I started bringing Tony, my husband, Ann’s future husband, with me. He didn’t come along at first because I get up so much earlier, but I lured him out the door with the image of frying bacon and pancakes so large and light that when they’re placed in front of you, you feel as if you’re a kid in a fairy tale.
 
Ann already dug me by the time I introduced her to Tony. We’d been checking each other out and romancing each other the way women do, so when Ann saw the way I feel about Tony, he was right in there. Then the other morning, as Tony and I were leaving, Ann said that once in a while she and her sister throw dinner parties at night after they close and she took our number to call us. It was nice because we don’t know anybody yet, unless you count the Terminix guy. But it was long before the dinner invitation that I had chosen Ann for Tony, although I hadn’t mentioned it to him until we were on our way home last Sunday morning.
 
“You could marry her,” I said, as I shut the Jeep door. “She’d be good for you.”
 
Tony tried to pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about, but since we’ve had this conversation on a couple of occasions he caught on pretty quickly.
 
“Will you shut up,” he responded.
 
“I’m serious. I can see her.” What I meant was he’d be OK with her, she’d understand him, appreciate both him and the love and work I’d put into him. Tony was a good guy when I met him, but I made him great. So I’m not giving him up to just any old tramp.
 
“You’re not going anywhere,” Tony said.
 
“That’s what you say.”
 
“That’s what I have to say,” Tony said.
 
And I guess he does. What good is it going to do him to worry that this illness I have may kill me sooner rather than later. I like to think the same way he does, but sometimes I worry. Even with some major rough spots, I have managed to stay alive with this serious blood disease for six years now. Still, a rare and serious disorder like mine is not exactly a ringing endorsement for longevity. Tony has to say nothing’s going to happen to me, and I have to be prepared for the possibility. I guess that’s what they call balance.
 
Essentially this illness affects my red blood cells. Doctors speculate that perhaps I caught a virus or had a toxic reaction and that my body created an antibody to fight the invader. Doctors believe the antibody successfully fought the virus or toxic reaction, but did not stop there. It apparently can’t differentiate between the now defeated invader and my healthy red blood cells. The antibody attacks the cells just before they are released from the bone marrow. As a result, my body is unable to produce mature red blood cells. Doctors have made up a lot of fancy names for this illness, but when you get right down to it it’s anemia. Just not the kind you take iron pills for. It is truly because of the miracles of modern science that I am alive.
 
Almost all the doctors familiar with my case have speculated that this illness may disappear as mysteriously as it first appeared, though as the years pass I believe this less and less. Especially since it’s now going stronger than ever. No one knows the cause of this disorder or how to cure it, and to figure out a way to treat it has been “a crapshoot,” to quote one of the country’s foremost hematologists. In case my illness doesn’t seem special enough, no one has seen it before. At least none of the many doctors I have seen or contacted around the world.
 
So my story isn’t a simple one. Not quite Ali MacGraw in Love Story. Well, maybe the Tony part of my story. I’d already been sick for two years when I met Tony. We’ve been together for four years, married for three. I hope it’ll be thirty-three someday, but that seems unlikely. If I boast a little about what I’ve done for Tony, it doesn’t compare with what he’s done for me. He’s my whole life.
 
I may hate being sick, I do want it to go away desperately, but I can no longer wish it never happened, because all the horrors I’ve endured for these past six years are a great part of the woman I’ve become. I don’t know who I would be if this hadn’t happened to me. And the woman I’ve become is the woman who fell in love with Tony Dunne, and I couldn’t give that up for anything in the entire world. Not even in exchange for my life. So yes, imagining Tony marrying Ann is a little bit of a joke. But just a little.

Editorial Reviews

In the winter of 1989, 32-year-old Rosemary Breslin got a headache that wouldn't go away. After many medical tests, transfusions and treatments it was determined that she had a life-threatening rare blood disease with no name -- and with no cure.

Breslin, a New York-based writer and daughter of famed newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, was about to lose it. She had no job, no money, no confidence, insufficient health insurance and was about to give up her apartment. Then friends fixed her up with Tony Dunne, a sweet set designer and nephew of John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne. She unexpectedly fell in love and moved into Tony's West Village apartment, where she became obsessed with cleaning and clothes washing. "I had reinvented myself as Donna Reed with a filthy mouth and an edge," she says.

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind is the raw, honest and often inspirational story of her struggles with illness, work and love. Though memoirs of sickness are often overly graphic, morbid and difficult to relate to, Breslin is an idiosyncratic writer who manages to make her story both poignant and universal. At one point, she's at the same hospital where her mother, whom she's named after, died of cancer. She tries desperately to get Tony to propose; after he does, she picks out his next wife in case she doesn't make it.

This book's funniest and most charming sections involve her father, who accompanies her to her doctor's appointments. When she feels helpless, he hands her a credit card and tells her to buy herself expensive clothes. He hounds her to keep writing and she does. She publishes a series of articles on her illness that run in Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She writes scripts for N.Y.P.D. Blue.

In another unusual twist, her father also winds up in the hospital. "My father got an aneurysm in his brain," she writes. "Of course, he doesn't get some wimpy thing like me. He goes for the gold. I'd always known he was going to steal the attention away from me in this whole illness thing." Her father revives and writes a book titled I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me, published last year, in which Rosemary is a character -- so the two now have dueling memoirs. They're both terrific storytellers. She's obviously inherited his blood, strength, guts, sense of humor and -- lucky for us -- his writing talent. Not Exactly What I Had in Mind is a riotous and oddly romantic debut. -- Salon

Susan Shapiro

Since 1989, Breslin, a freelance writer and daughter of journalist Jimmy, has been battling a mysterious blood disease that threatens her life and that physicians have been unable to identify. In this candid and funny memoir, Breslin recounts how she managed to hang on to a zest for living despite arduous treatments and astronomical medical bills. Because the disease attacks her red blood cells, she must have frequent infusions of gamma globulin supplemented by transfusions. In the midst of her illness, Breslin met and married Tony Dunne, nephew of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion; their love, according to the author, is the mainstay of her life. She also has supportive friends and family, including her father, with whom she claims to have a combative, loving relationship. Rosemary's aggressive spirit has helped her deal with a bureaucratic medical system as well as a serious bout with pneumonia, and here it makes for a lively, frank-talking memoir.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Journalist Breslin, whose essays about living with a mysterious blood disease have won her countless supporters, finds love during one of her darkest moments.

Library Journal

YA-While in her early 30s, Breslin became seriously ill from a blood disease so rare that her doctors were and remain baffled about its diagnosis and treatment. She tells the story of her life openly and humorously, and it is quite a life. She is no angel, and was even less so in her teens and 20s, following the rules she thought appropriate, disregarding the rest. But she is resourceful, witty, talented, and a terrific fighter. During her endless tests, procedures, and hospitalizations, her father, Jimmy Breslin, is by her side, literally and figuratively, and her stepmother and many friends are enormously supportive. YAs will connect with this heartwarming love story told by a heroine unafraid to show her warts. Her writing style is fast-paced, funny, achingly painful, yet totally engaging. Breslin believes that her illness has made possible three miraculous gifts: life with her beloved husband; her newly acquired feelings of self-worth and self-acceptance; and the rewards found in her writing abilities. These far outweigh what she doesn't have: a baby, or expectation of a long life. It's not what she expected, but it's more than okay with her.Judy Sokoll, formerly at Fairfax County Public Library, VA

School Library Journal

A self-proclaimed "motor mouth from hell," who comes on like a ditzy, spoiled valley girl with a flip New York edge, chronicles her struggle with irreversible anemia and the romance that changes her life.

Scriptwriter Breslin is in her early 30s and already two years into her debilitating affliction when she meets Tony Dunne, a solid, brooding type ("the thinking woman's football player") who builds movie sets and has his own history of problems. Her self- esteem is in the toilet: "Everything about me is 'used to.' I used to have a job, used to be well, used to have money and an apartment. I used to be somebody." She falls head over heels, as does Tony, though he's unprepared to meet "the marriage monolith . . . in full force." But that doesn't deter Rosemary or much affect her addictive shopping habits. She schemes, manipulates, even pilfers money from Tony's pockets to support her overdeveloped sense of entitlement; at one point she owns up to having "not a penny in my pocket" for the rent or back taxes or any of a host of creditors, but she does have "a $500 sweater and $260 shoes"—those courtesy of her father, newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who gets off, she says, on the idea of dropping money to hide pain, of which she has plenty. Some unidentifiable antibody is killing off Rosemary's red blood cells; her survival depends on regular massive gamma globulin transfusions plus other, experimental therapies. Rosemary and her father carry on a dance of collusion and collision, he representing success, competition, authority, all of which she resists.

To the extent that she exploits her experience of chronic illness to expose her self-centeredness and lack of impulse control, Breslin consigns her story to the realms of sitcom and soap opera. Once she achieves the affirmation of mutual love and professional recognition, however, she can claim to be a model of survival.

Kirkus Reviews