Author event! Gila Pfeffer & Jessica Zucker

About the book:

A sharp, funny, and heartfelt memoir of losing both parents to cancer and the daring choices Gila Pfeffer made to avoid the same early demise

By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family, having lost her mother to breast cancer and her father to colon cancer. A simple blood test confirmed she carried the BRCA1 gene―which put her at high risk of developing cancer herself. Determined to break the cycle of early death in her family, Gila decides to undergo an elective double mastectomy.

This memoir follows her journey as she becomes a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, grows up, falls in love, and enters motherhood, before her life is derailed yet again. Her double mastectomy reveals cancer already growing in one breast.

After enduring eight rounds of chemo and the removal of her ovaries, she takes her last-ever dip in the mikvah waters as a bald, menopausal, thirty-five-year-old mother of four. With chutzpah honed over years of repeatedly surviving the worst, she manages to save her own life.

Drenched in Gila’s dark humor, Nearly Departed is a story about thriving against the odds, committing to what’s important, and leaving a better legacy than the one you inherited.

About the authors:

Gila Pfeffer is a humor writer, breast cancer prevention advocate and public speaker. Her award winning memoir NEARLY DEPARTED: Adventures in Loss, Cancer and Other Inconveniences has been described as heartbreakingly hilarious and lifesaving. Gila’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Today.com, Oprah Daily and more. Follow her tongue-in-cheek monthly FEEL IT ON THE FIRST campaign on Instagram. She lives in NYC and London.

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Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based psychologist specializing in reproductive health and the author of the award-winning books NORMALIZE IT: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives and I HAD A MISCARRIAGE: A Memoir, a Movement. Jessica is the creator of the viral #IHadaMiscarriagecampaign. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Vogue, and Harvard Business Review, among others. She’s been featured on NPR, CNN, The Today Show, and Good Morning America and earned advanced degrees from New York University and Harvard University.