A memoir, both touching and painful

As the author begins this memoir in her 32d year she’s a little behind schedule. Unlike her older sister, who married and had children early, she has only recently married, and her rush to pregnancy confuses both her friends and her new husband. “A baby will change everything,’’ he points out. “Are we really ready for that?’’ But Boesky hears her own accelerated biological clock ticking, and knows “it was time to seize the day.’’

Her reasoning is clear: We are treated to her regular doctor visits and understand her fixation on the various tests available at the time, the early ’90s. But it is difficult not to sympathize with her husband as she frets anxiously and obsessively over elements she cannot control. “Maybe,’’ he says, “you should talk about this with someone,’’ even as the writer posits, “I worry, therefore I am.’’

Soon, however, her concerns take on flesh. First, her younger sister loses a baby, a tragedy that makes her own pregnancy feel tentative. Then, amid the usual concerns of work and new motherhood, Boesky learns that her mother, who had a prophylactic hysterectomy years before, has early-stage breast cancer. “You worry and worry about wearing your seat belt . . . and then wham a meteor comes along,’’ says her mother, the “mixer of metaphors.’’

At the time, before the various “breast cancer genes’’ BRCA1 and BRCA2 were identified, this seemed like a comparatively benign disease, unrelated to the family curse. But as the cancer recurs, Boesky is drawn into the real world of uncertainty. Raising her baby, she watches her mother decline in a series of poignant scenes that illustrate just how fragile life is. It’s a familiar story if a horrible one of human endurance, detailing the progression of day-to-day growth alongside day-to-day loss.