Stevenson rises above adversity in this remarkable account of her eldest daughter’s struggles with cystic fibrosisThis is a pleasing memoir and a surprise. It is being sold by Helen Stevenson’s publisher as the story of a mother whose eldest daughter,Clara, was born with cystic fibrosis: a genetically inherited disease in which salt is unable to pass from one cell to another. This leads to a build-up of mucus and persistent infection. It is a disease that affects 70000 people worldwide and requires intensive physiotherapy and medication. It can drastically shorten life: most sufferers do not compose it beyond their 30s, or although gene therapy may be approximately to improve on this.
One assumes,picking the book up, that this is to be another in the multiplying company of memoirs that rely upon a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I audience. Among these are some remarkable books – Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam approximately her autistic sons; Michael Greenberg’s rush Down Sunshine approximately his bipolar daughter; Erwin Mortier’s Stammered Songbook approximately his mother’s Alzheimer’s – but the sympathy they excite is allied to an uneasy cheer in reading approximately family lives that are (with any luck) more stressed than one’s own. Helen Stevenson’s book rises above such unease. It is something else again.
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Source: theguardian.com