Daughter of Family G.

not as morbid as I thought it might be. her family has a history of specific cancers going back generations. the older sister of her great-grandmother created a huge family tree while collaborating with a physician (who believed eugenics would improve mankind by weeding out the inferior) to kick off a study of heredity wrt cancer. and yet, later on this same family history is useful in isolating the gene causing this family's cancers, proving that scientific information is neutral - what you do with it is political.

as an aside I wonder about the author's willingness to display herself and her diagnoses. she got her first big break as a storyteller doing a radio documentary on CBC that had her receiving her cancer gene confirmation live and that feels so exploitive (even if you do it to yourself). if the price of fame and success is having no privacy, I don't want any part of it.

and lastly, even though there is this huge family tree available, there aren't many strong connections outside the author's nuclear family: her mom, her dad, her sons and maybe one cousin. she makes a point of saying she and her siblings were kept connected thru their parents; that they didn't speak to each other, but kept up-to-date by news reports thru their parents. so when the parents died, they had little connection. that reality is in stark contrast to the book I'm concurrently reading, No Great Mischief, where the bonds of a (fictional) family are deep and almost mystical. I'm beyond sad that families, even in the face of a cancer diagnosis, are so easily weakened by time and geography.