A love letter to a family torn asunder by cancer
Lawrence Ingrassia’s mother died of cancer at just 42, and over the following decades cancer marched through the family, killing his two younger sisters, at 24 and 32, a nephew (who had survived cancer as a toddler) at 39, and his sole remaining sibling, brother Paul, who endured several different cancers before dying at 69.
Medical researchers had long sought to understand cancer, first arguing that viruses were the cause, then that environmental factors must be. But a young pair of epidemiologists, looking at families with multiple cancers, suspected genetics were involved. In 1990, Drs. Li and Fraumeni identified the specific gene that had laid waste to the Ingrassia siblings and other families like them.
“After my brother died in 2019, I was curious to know a bit more about Li-Fraumeni Syndrome,” says Ingrassia. Aside from the fact that he had then been tested and found not to have the mutation, he adds, “I didn’t know very much.”
After talking with Dr. Fraumeni, then in his late 80s (Dr. Li had already died), Ingrassia began working on a book. “A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical
Mystery” interweaves both narratives, the personal and the scientific, into what its author calls “a love letter to my family as well as a medical detective story.”
Ingrassia’s long career as a journalist hadn’t included science.
“I had to kind of learn it all!” he says, adding that many doctors served as his guides. “A lot of them were very willing to help. Joe Fraumeni and Fred Li aren’t very well known outside of the cancer world, but they’re really renowned and beloved as pioneers inside it.”
Still, writing about his own family’s losses was difficult at times. “I think when you do a book like this you have two hats on,” he says. “You try to be as objective as you can. But of course they aren’t just any other family. You want to bring them to life, to honor them.”
He hopes that readers will finish his book with two ideas. One, to recognize the “unsung heroes” whose research into cancer has led to such progress in understanding and treating the disease: “Part of it was to say, you know, ‘God bless you.’”
He also hopes that his family’s story will perhaps inspire others to rebuild any ruptured ties with siblings. “Family is the most important thing,” he says. “We’re here and we’re gone.” Lawrence Ingrassia will be in conversation with Ron Suskind at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 16, at Belmont Books.