My so-Called Normal Life: How I Learned to Balance Love, Work, Family, Friends, and ...Cancer at 23 Book

"Twenty-three years old and fresh out of college, in love with her boyfriend Nick, and having just started a great new job as assistant editor at Glamour magazine, Erin Zammett was looking forward to a future of unlimited promise - until she was confronted by the one experience that no person, young or old, is ever prepared to face.  A routine checkup by her doctor seemed to indicate that she was in perfect health, until she was called back just a day later to be told that a blood test revealed she had a type of cancer, Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia, the only known treatment for which was a bone marrow transplant; without treatment, she had roughly five years to live.
    After the initial shock wore off, and with the support of her family and friends, her own inner strength, and a recently approved experimental drug, Zammett immediately began the journey that would lead her to recovery.  She began to document her experiences to provide an outlet for the thoughts that came rushing to confront the brave new world she had entered, and the result, My So-Called Normal Life, is a memoir of unparalleled candor and poignancy, encompassing much more than leukemia and the battle to overcome it.  Above all, it's the story of a twenty-something living her dream life amid the unlimited excitement and adventure of Manhattan and confronting the challenges of life and her new job - battling cancer-with unbounded courage and optimism."

Publishers Weekly

Zammett had a job at Glamour, a cute boyfriend and a Manhattan apartment. She also had leukemia. Her memoir about battling cancer while also helping her sister plan her wedding and editing beauty and sex stories will provide young women in her predicament an account to identify with. Zammett tells her story as if she were recounting it to a girlfriend on the phone, and dwells on mundanities like family dynamics and her diet. Her humor is the book's strength; when she finds out her sister may donate bone marrow to cure her, she writes, "I made a mental note to start being nicer to Meghan." Laughter, not surprisingly, is an antidote to despair, yet real pain and suffering are largely absent from this memoir. Zammett mentions her weight more often than her mortality: "I'd find myself more anxious about the number of pounds I weighed than the number of leukemia cells swimming through my body." In the end, readers who've never experienced the profundity of a potentially deadly disease are left with no more insight, perhaps because Zammett isn't, either: "I also felt I had failed the disease in some way, failed to have that newfound perspective on life that I thought came with every diagnosis." Agents, Ed Victor and William Clark. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.