Barbara Delinsky

Tales of Survival

Barbara Delinsky, J67, the author of such novels as Looking for Peyton Place and The Woman Next Door, was eight years old when her mother died of breast cancer. By the time she found out she herself had breast cancer at age 49, the news came almost as a relief. “My doctor said, ‘All your life you’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and guess what, it’s a very small shoe. We can cure this.’ ”

Until she wrote a book for breast cancer survivors called Uplift, however, she told almost no one that she had the disease. “I didn’t want to live day to day with people asking how I was feeling,” she says. “For me it was important to be private.” That changed when she put a character suffering from breast cancer in one of her novels and was deluged with mail from readers. She realized that there were other patients like her who valued privacy, but still needed support and solace in the middle of the night.

Uplift, originally published in 2001 and subtitled Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors, includes stories from women arranged around themes such as “Diagnosis,” “Recurrence,” and “Men.” For a new edition to be published this fall, Delinsky has added a chapter with letters from many of the original women five years later. “I didn’t anticipate how positive they would be,” she says. “Many women used breast cancer to reevaluate their lives and make really big changes.”

A psychology major while at Tufts, Delinsky started writing short romance novels on a lark in 1981. Her work quickly evolved to tackle more serious themes, often featuring female protagonists dealing with wrenching family issues, in a new genre referred to as “women’s fiction.” With more than 16 New York Times bestsellers to her credit, she since has connected with her mother’s memory through a private foundation funded through sales of Uplift. It sponsors a yearly breast surgery fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, where her mother was treated. For someone who was private about her disease, Delinsky now relishes her role as one of breast cancer’s public faces, regularly accepting offers to speak at survivor events.

“I don’t get a high from being on the New York Times bestseller list anymore,” she says. “The real high for me is being with survivors.”