Review: "Living Proof" by Tiffany Graham Charkosky

 

Living Proof by Tiffany Graham Charkosky
Published October 2025 via Little A
★★★

Charkosky was eleven when her mother died of cancer. It was a tragedy, and it tore her life apart—but cancer is common, and Charkosky and her family found ways to move forward as best they could. But decades later, when she and her husband were trying for their second child, Charkosky got news that turned everything upside down again: There was a good chance that Charkosky's mother's cancer stemmed from a genetic condition that made certain cancers almost inevitable, and if she'd had it, there was a 50-50 chance that Charkosky and each of her siblings had inherited it.

Almost two years passed between that car ride and actually losing her. The part that seems the cruelest is that my memories of her sickness have eclipsed most of my memories of her life. (loc. 263)

I read this partly because I read A Fatal Inheritance not too long ago. In A Fatal Inheritance, the author describes a different genetic quirk that made cancer run rampant through his family, and he dives into the science behind it and the quest to figure out just what went wrong. It's both fascinating and devastating.

Living Proof doesn't go so much into the science (Inheritance is part memoir, part reportage; Proof is straight memoir), but it's equally devastating to consider all the factors that Charkosky had to consider, starting with the simplest: get tested or not? Testing doesn't change the facts, but it might change the outcomes; knowing that you have a gene that predisposes you to major medical things can mean regular, targeted testing in the interest of catching things before they're a problem. It also means upheaval, and complications like suddenly being ineligible for life insurance, and deciding whether to have preventive surgeries, and wondering whether your own children have gotten the gene. And for Charkosky, it wasn't just herself—she had two siblings who had the same chances of inheriting the gene that she did, and they had to make their own decisions about whether or not to get tested, and what to do with the information either way.

It's a lot to wrestle with. Charkosky does a good job of unpicking those things, which are of course further complicated by the grief of having lost someone to the same thing you're now facing. I hate the subtitle, perhaps irrationally so ("how love defied genetic legacy" reads to me as "how love cured a gene mutation", which of course is not what it means, but still), but it's otherwise an interesting read, especially if you're curious about the ways genetics can get tricky.