Sick Girl

Book excerpt: This shockingly frank and irreverent memoir of a young woman’s life with a heart transplant “will inspire and choke you up with tears and laughter” (Larry King). At twenty-four, Amy Silverstein was your typical type-A law student: smart, driven, and highly competitive. With a full course load and a budding romance, it seemed nothing could slow her down. Until her heart began to fail. With a grace and force reminiscent of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face or Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Amy chronicles her medical saga from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing and ongoing recovery. Her memoir is made all the more dramatic by the deliriously romantic bedside courtship with her future husband, and her uncompromising desire to become a mother. Distrustful of her doctors and insistent in her refusal to be the “grateful heart patient” she is expected to be, Amy presents a patient’s perspective that is truly eye-opening and even controversial. Amy’s shocking honesty and irreverent humor allow the reader to live her nightmare from the inside—an unforgettable experience that is both painfully disturbing and utterly compelling.