Tiffany Graham Charkosky, LIVING PROOF: How Love Defied Genetic Legacy
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[0:45]Tiffany Graham Charkovsky is the author of Living Proof, How Love to Fight Genetic
[0:49]Legacy.
[0:50]Tiffany's writing explores the dynamics at work within human relationships and has
[0:55]been featured in Gordon Square Review, Mother Magazine, South Dakota Review, and Avalon
[1:00]Literary Review.
[1:01]With a background in creative writing and urban planning, Tiffany has worked in the arts
[1:05]for over 20 years.
[1:06]She lives with her husband, two sons, and two dogs in Northeast Ohio.
[1:10]Welcome, Tiffany.
[1:11]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Book to talk about your book, Living Proof.
[1:16]I love Defied Genetic Legacy.
[1:18]Congratulations.
[1:19]Thank you.
[1:20]I'm so happy to be here.
[1:23]I learned so much about you, sometimes when I read a memoir and then I meet the author,
[1:26]I'm like, oh my gosh, but I know everything, and let's just pick right up in the middle
[1:31]here.
[1:32]You shared so much about your motherhood, your the losses in your life, your husband,
[1:38]your kids, the this genetic situation you found yourself in.
[1:43]But really, you just took us so in the middle of all of the emotions.
[1:48]It was just, I really, really enjoyed the book.
[1:51]So congratulations.
[1:52]It's very well done.
[1:53]So much.
[1:54]It's such a weird place to be in on the other side of having worked on something for
[1:58]so long and to start seeing that people are having an emotional response to it is just
[2:04]why you write books like this.
[2:05]So thank you.
[2:06]You're welcome.
[2:08]Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about what your book is about?
[2:11]Well, it starts with the discovery that I might have had a genetic mutation.
[2:18]I, father calls and tells me that my uncle had genetic testing before he passed away.
[2:25]And all of a sudden, all these pieces of my life started to make sense having lost my
[2:29]mother when I was 11 and she was only 30, which seemed very weird and obviously terrible
[2:36]at the time, but discovering that she most likely had a genetic mutation called Lynch syndrome,
[2:43]which leads to a whole host of early onset cancers.
[2:47]It really made sense and it also was pretty scary in the sense that I learned I might
[2:53]carry it as well and I had a two year old son at the time.
[2:57]And the worry that I might have already passed something onto him unintentionally.
[3:03]And so the book is really about my journey through the genetic testing process and then
[3:08]also rediscovering who my mother was as a mother myself and processing a lot of feelings
[3:16]and fears that I had carried, but sort of buried, you know, when you have go through
[3:20]something as a child, I think often you just keep moving and there was no opportunity
[3:26]to keep moving anymore.
[3:28]And it was really a book about learning how to live inside a body that is different than
[3:32]what you thought and how to continue building a meaningful life around it.
[3:37]So I've been working through the genetic testing process and then it really goes through
[3:42]the different sets of decisions that I personally made, which aren't recommendations
[3:46]to others, but wanted to just be really open and honest about what it felt like to have
[3:52]a genetic risk for genetic cancers and then learning how to kind of live with the miracle
[3:58]of science and build a series of life decisions that I can be proud of.
[4:04]Wow.
[4:04]My gosh.
[4:05]Going back to when you were a child and your mother not just passing away but being very
[4:12]ill for a long time and you're having to deal with that and you have one moment in the
[4:16]book where she's quite sick and you realize, oh my gosh, I don't, she's not going to make
[4:22]it.
[4:23]Like she's never going to get better even though everyone keeps telling me like and telling
[4:26]her you're going to be okay and and even later in the book you talk about how your mother
[4:32]never really accepted that she was going to die, that she was fighting to the last
[4:37]second and just would, there was no sense of peace, really it was anger and she wanted
[4:43]to fight it and she didn't want to go and that is very hard to cope with and it's all
[4:48]hard and I'm so sorry for this loss.
[4:51]Tell me about writing your way through it at this point going through it.
[4:56]Just talk about it.
[4:57]It took a long time and I think it's hard to go back and I think this is probably true
[5:03]for all memoirists you can probably relate to this too.
[5:06]You have to sort of force yourself to sit inside memories that might feel sort of shadowy
[5:12]or you know the specific scene that you're talking about where the realization that my
[5:17]mother was never going to get better was really hard and it lived with me for a long
[5:22]time.
[5:23]I think what writing this project led me to do was bring the adult experience to what
[5:32]I felt as a child and that also meant it gave me some compassion for the way that I felt
[5:38]as a child.
[5:39]I now have two children who are older than I was when my mother passed away and a lot
[5:44]of the writing for this was learning to understand who she may have been and how we might
[5:51]have related to each other to look at myself without the judgmental eyes of a teenager
[5:57]or a pre-teenager and really see just how young I was and how inexperienced it living
[6:04]I was.
[6:06]And so writing this book I don't want to say it was cathartic because I don't think anybody
[6:10]should write a memoir as a way of cleansing themselves of an experience.
[6:16]I think that's probably what journaling and therapy and your friends are for but I think
[6:21]what it did was it helped me find a story inside of all of this and make sense and it
[6:28]really led to a much deeper understanding of who I am and how I am and that goes not
[6:33]just for me but my brother and my sister and my father.
[6:37]And so I think it really helped me have a better sense of empathy for all of us now that
[6:43]we're all many years down the road from that experience.
[6:47]And you also write about living in Ohio, your commitment to urban planning and like making
[6:54]that place better and the crazy thing, well it's not so crazy but I happen to be at Oberlin
[7:01]reading this book and I was like oh my gosh, what are the odds?
[7:05]I've never been to Oberlin in my entire life and I read a bazillion books and yet I was
[7:10]obviously meant to be there reading this book.
[7:12]That makes me so happy because Oberlin is such an important place to me.
[7:16]I didn't go to school there.
[7:18]I moved about eight miles away from there when I was in high school and Oberlin is a weird
[7:26]and wonderful place in that it's this amazing liberal arts college surrounded by basically
[7:32]farmland in the middle of Lorraine County which is where my family moved a couple years
[7:37]after my mother passed away and it's also where I had my first date with my husband
[7:41]husband and so it's these places really important to me and I think we're all shaped
[7:47]by the landscape that we live in and I did end up studying urban planning and still
[7:54]work in the arts.
[7:55]I work for Cleveland Public Library and we work with artists all throughout the city of
[7:59]Cleveland and I just feel so informed by it sounds funny to say I was so informed by this
[8:05]rural space that I lived in but I think it really gave me a sense of the different kinds
[8:09]of landscapes that can live so close to each other and I think the metaphor for that
[8:16]for me is that we live with all of these different things all the time all the different
[8:20]versions of me live in the same place at the same time and it's sort of figuring out what
[8:27]one's getting more oxygen at any given time.
[8:30]Well I think you echo that in the structure of the book too right you have us keep going
[8:35]back and forth to different moments past present which I found made the pacing work
[8:42]really well with the book I mean as a book I know it's your life but just if we're taking
[8:46]it apart as a book from you being a mom to you being a child to you falling in love
[8:51]to just all the things one minute you're dealing with your brother and your sister
[8:57]today and then the next minute you know it's your grandfather's child or whatever and it's
[9:03]sort of how we think about our life like that is how we go about our day is that we deal
[9:08]with what's in front of us then we think about the past and we go do something now and
[9:12]so I just felt the way we pulled the story was incredibly compelling and made the pages
[9:17]really really turn and you know it just I felt it worked structurally I think it worked
[9:22]so well how you did it.
[9:23]Thank you I'm so happy to hear that because life is nothing like a book it is like a book
[9:28]and it's not like a book and I think that that structure is something that took me so long
[9:34]to get to and any writer I think might say once you find that way the framework that the rest
[9:41]of your story can hang on it's just it opens everything up and you give yourself some constraints
[9:49]to work within but also it helps with well I'm showing this moment in the past and this other
[9:54]moment in the present how are they mirroring each other and why are they next to each other and
[10:00]But I'm really grateful to hear that that structurally speaking
[10:03]that is something that works for readers
[10:06]who don't know anything about me or my life.
[10:09]Yes, 100%.
[10:10]You write about being a mom a lot and being a mom who's pregnant
[10:15]and you have one moment where you have morning sickness
[10:18]and which is such a misnomer, but you were vomiting
[10:21]and you wanted your son Ben to leave
[10:24]because you didn't want to upset him.
[10:25]And of course, knowing your history of watching your mom's
[10:28]sick, it's probably just made it all the worse.
[10:31]And you finally had to say to him, no, no, I'm throwing up
[10:33]because there's a baby in here.
[10:35]And you have this memory where his face was crumpling up
[10:38]and because you were like, I need you to leave
[10:40]and he didn't want to leave.
[10:42]And it's like, it doesn't matter what's going on
[10:44]with our families, right?
[10:45]You want to be there.
[10:47]Nothing's going to be away, but as a mom,
[10:50]our instincts are to protect.
[10:51]So just talk about that for a little bit.
[10:54]Yeah, I think that that was a scene that came late
[10:57]in the drafting of this book for me.
[10:59]It wasn't, and there's a couple early scenes with Ben
[11:02]that being one of them that wasn't originally part
[11:06]of this story, but I felt like it was really important
[11:09]for me to be able to show,
[11:12]because I tried to show what my mother was like
[11:14]and what my childhood was like,
[11:16]but also how our childhood sort of shape,
[11:19]how we're responding to our children
[11:21]in any given moment.
[11:23]And I think as mothers, we put a lot of pressure
[11:26]on ourselves to be perfect all the time.
[11:29]We want to be the best possible version of a mother,
[11:32]but anybody who you're with,
[11:35]basically every minute of every day
[11:37]is going to see the good, the bad, the ugly.
[11:40]They're going to learn how to be human
[11:42]by us showing them what being human looks like.
[11:46]And so those scenes were difficult
[11:48]and they were difficult also because I felt so much guilt
[11:54]during that pregnancy that I wasn't like,
[11:57]the mother that I wanted to be,
[11:59]that I was kind of dealing with so many things.
[12:01]And that, what if I lost this baby?
[12:04]Like I had all these fears of all the things.
[12:07]And so I think that those scenes were really critical
[12:11]for me to sort of grapple with like,
[12:13]why do I need this to be in here?
[12:15]And what am I trying to show the reader
[12:19]with this information?
[12:21]Because that's the other thing about memoir
[12:23]that is so challenging is that it's never just
[12:25]what is, what's the experience for me as a writer,
[12:28]but it's why is this beneficial to the reader?
[12:32]And so it's helpful for me to actually hear
[12:35]these responses from people who are reading these books,
[12:38]not knowing anything and they can get a sense from you.
[12:41]See why those are in there
[12:42]and what they're trying to move along.
[12:45]Interesting.
[12:46]Yeah.
[12:47]It's been really late in the book
[12:49]and not to give anything away,
[12:50]but you basically were given the wrong dosage of a medicine
[12:56]and it had a lot of emotional impact.
[12:58]And I related so much to that
[13:01]because when something affects us,
[13:03]especially something related to our hormones in any way,
[13:06]whether it's like a birth control pill when you're younger,
[13:09]like a menopause thing or whatever,
[13:11]when we become irritable or any of those emotional things,
[13:15]we don't view that as a side effect.
[13:18]We don't view that as something that is wrong with us
[13:22]or that's just how we're feeling
[13:24]and your thanks to your husband,
[13:27]you were able to figure out
[13:29]that there was actually a cause for your behavior shift
[13:31]but it's so hard to identify.
[13:33]Tell listeners a little bit more about that.
[13:36]Where, so I am on hormone replacement therapy
[13:39]and which is something that I had never really thought about
[13:43]until I needed to think about.
[13:45]And I was on a dose of medication
[13:48]that was not the right dose for me.
[13:50]It was much too low and I was, you know,
[13:53]as a COVID summer, I'm home with my children
[13:56]and my husband and my husband is the teacher
[13:59]and so they are always home all summer.
[14:01]And I was mad at them the whole summer,
[14:04]like everything they did bothered me,
[14:06]everything I did bothered me.
[14:08]And I think that when you are going through
[14:12]those hormonal problems, I could see that
[14:15]like being a moment where you might think,
[14:17]am I in the wrong marriage?
[14:19]Am I in the wrong life?
[14:20]What am I doing here?
[14:22]And that was really, really challenging.
[14:26]And my husband said, you know,
[14:29]if this isn't who you are, you know,
[14:31]I think you need to call your doctor.
[14:33]And I was of course offended by that
[14:35]and, you know, quit making the way I feel
[14:38]about, you know, female hysteria
[14:40]or we like not allowed to have, you know,
[14:42]I was very felt very judged by that.
[14:45]I should also just note that I'm the only woman
[14:47]in the house I live in.
[14:48]I have, um, us and I have two sons.
[14:50]I even have two male dogs.
[14:52]And so it was just,
[14:54]I think I was feeling kind of personally attacked,
[14:56]but also that sense of like,
[14:58]I think on the other side of that was,
[15:00]what if he's wrong?
[15:02]And what if this really is who I am now?
[15:06]I think is a scary feeling too.
[15:08]And I ended up having my hormone levels adjusted.
[15:10]And I think part of what your brain does to you
[15:13]is it's really good at convincing you
[15:15]that however you're feeling in any moment
[15:17]is how you have always felt
[15:19]and how you will feel for the rest of your life.
[15:21]And at least that's the way my brain works.
[15:24]And so being able to step back
[15:25]and say just because this is what my brain is telling me
[15:28]doesn't mean that it's true.
[15:30]And, and it was scary to say,
[15:32]what if I can't trust myself anymore?
[15:33]What if I have to be able to listen to somebody
[15:36]who loves me and I have to trust somebody
[15:39]to like notice when those calibrations are off?
[15:42]It's putting a lot of like,
[15:43]I think I'm part of the,
[15:45]what I go through in the book
[15:46]is I'm a pretty self sufficient person,
[15:48]but I think that's sort of a trauma response.
[15:50]And being able to say,
[15:52]I have to let somebody care for me in this way.
[15:55]And I think that that's a hard thing to learn how to do.
[15:58]And I hope that I'm still doing it
[16:01]because it's not a perfect thing
[16:02]that you do once and you keep going,
[16:05]I think it's an active practice.
[16:08]And tell me a little bit about your publishing journey
[16:11]because it's not easy to get memoirs out.
[16:14]It's not easy to get memoirs out there.
[16:16]I submitted my book to 60 agents
[16:22]over the course of maybe two years.
[16:24]And I feel like I want to say to anybody out there
[16:28]who's trying to get a book published.
[16:31]I sent my query out in batches
[16:33]and I, you know, batches of like between four and six.
[16:37]If I was getting no bytes on a query,
[16:39]I would kind of pull it back and say,
[16:41]how can I tweak this a little?
[16:43]I think there's a lot of advice.
[16:44]Just send out 100 and wait to see what happens.
[16:48]I felt like if I send them out in small batches
[16:50]and I'm getting nothing,
[16:51]then maybe I can tinker with it a little bit more.
[16:53]So I sort of took that approach
[16:56]that you get one shot with every agent who you query.
[16:59]So I just kept saying,
[17:00]if I'm getting nothing,
[17:01]then is it the manuscript or is it the query?
[17:04]And I just sort of kept going back and forth on that.
[17:06]In my case, you know, very early on,
[17:08]I wasn't even getting requests for the manuscript.
[17:11]So I'm like,
[17:11]something's not working in the query.
[17:13]So you kind of focus on that.
[17:15]I ended up getting an agent in,
[17:19]I was around March or April of 2024.
[17:23]So I had a pretty quick journey,
[17:25]if you say that this has been maybe 15 months or so,
[17:29]since that happened.
[17:30]And we went through two rounds of revisions together.
[17:35]I'm fortunate.
[17:36]I have an agent who's pretty early in her agency and career
[17:39]but is very experienced in the book world.
[17:42]And so that to me was helpful.
[17:44]I really wanted an agent who had some life experience
[17:48]under their belt and kind of would understand,
[17:51]you know, I'm in my 40s.
[17:53]I have a life career.
[17:54]Like I wanted somebody who would kind of get that whole picture.
[17:58]We went through two rounds of developmental,
[18:00]or I'm sorry, of edits.
[18:02]And then we had a plan to go out on submission
[18:05]in fall of 2024 in August of last summer.
[18:09]So August 24, she said,
[18:12]hey, don't be mad at me,
[18:13]but I soft pitched your project to a publisher
[18:18]that had lost a memoir project for next year being this year.
[18:22]They're looking for something that's pretty well cooked.
[18:25]And I think your project could be a good fit for them.
[18:28]So we worked really hard.
[18:30]We spent about 10 days working, you know,
[18:32]updating my proposal, making my first 50 pages,
[18:35]as good as they could possibly be.
[18:36]So we had been planning on going out on submission
[18:39]and just, you know, about a month or so after that.
[18:42]So sent them everything they asked for the full manuscript
[18:46]or what I had of the manuscript with the understanding
[18:49]that it wasn't fully done.
[18:52]And then a couple months later,
[18:54]I had an offer for the book from them.
[18:57]And then I spent the entire like month of December
[19:01]going through edits with the editor
[19:03]that I had at Little A, who's my publisher.
[19:06]And so it was a long process.
[19:08]And then it became a really fast process.
[19:11]And I feel like that's really unusual,
[19:14]especially in the memoir sphere.
[19:15]You see so much about how hard it is to sell memoir projects.
[19:21]I do not have like an incredibly robust social media presence.
[19:25]I am pretty well connected like in the field of work
[19:30]that I do and I work at a library.
[19:32]So I do, you know, understand books and authors
[19:36]and public programming and things to that extent.
[19:39]So I do think it was an untraditional process.
[19:43]And I feel very lucky that I had the process that I had
[19:47]instead of sort of having this project
[19:49]be out on submission for so long.
[19:51]But I do feel like it was a matter of having an agent
[19:54]who gave it a lot of attention
[19:56]and really pitched it to the right to edit.
[20:00]who really wanted to see it and got what I was trying to do and it's so amazing because I also
[20:06]hear a lot about authors who their book at the end isn't exactly what they thought it would be
[20:10]when they started and I feel really fortunate because my team did nothing but help make the book
[20:17]at better version of what I always hoped it would be but you know was too close to it for that
[20:21]to happen. So my editor was amazing. The whole team has just been incredible and I'm kind of
[20:27]pinching myself that it's been such a good process so far. Really amazing. What would you say
[20:32]to people who also have a genetic not to give things away but I guess it's okay to say. Yeah it's
[20:38]pretty clear on the back cover and why I wrote the book in the first place. I know you just you know
[20:43]I don't like to read the back like I decide what I'm gonna read and then when I start reading it I
[20:49]don't like remind myself. I like to just be totally surprised. I love that. So I wasn't sure you'd
[20:55]have it or not. I was thinking it would be a shorter book if you didn't but anyway you know
[21:00]for people who are living with a genetic predisposition or marker repeat whatever. What do you say
[21:06]to them? I say feel your feelings and live proactively and for me one of the things that I really
[21:17]needed to grapple with was that this wasn't a thing that I had done. I didn't do anything wrong
[21:24]but I think sometimes when you have a health challenge it becomes a personal failing I think and
[21:33]I think that that can go in a lot of different ways. For me it felt like I was on a path to build
[21:40]the most solid life for myself that I could and I know that that was in direct response to the
[21:46]childhood that I had. Whatever I can do I need to be here with my children was you know the mindset
[21:53]that I had and so I think my feeling would be find a really good genetic counselor and talk through
[22:01]what this means for you. One of the things that I really thought a lot about was that we can get
[22:07]all kinds of genetic information when we take these genetic tests and you can be told you carry
[22:13]you know a certain genetic variant and there are risks associated with it. A lot of that comes to
[22:19]you in language that is hard to decipher what it means for you and it also doesn't come with
[22:25]any plan of action for learning how to battle the emotional side of things like how do I live with
[22:32]this? How do I accept that my future is different than I had thought it might be and so I think my
[22:41]recommendations would be try to give yourself space to feel what you feel but don't be afraid to
[22:51]learn more and forgive yourself if you can for however you're sort of responding to the emotional
[23:00]piece of it and don't feel bad if it takes you longer than you think. I think it's not an overnight
[23:07]thing and your feelings change. We all are always sort of changing all the time and I mean I know
[23:13]I wrote this book and I'm here talking to you right now and I had to say to my agent and editor like
[23:20]I don't know how to end this book because this is still a story that I'm living through right now
[23:26]there isn't like an end date to it and so but I think for me and I hope for others it's just
[23:32]eyes wide open and knowledge is power even if knowledge is scary. Thank you so much for coming on
[23:40]and thank you. I read every page. I really enjoyed it. I loved learning your story. I felt so invested
[23:47]in the character's quote unquote meaning you and thank you for sharing it with the rest of us.
[23:52]Thank you and thank you so much for tomorrow's news. I'm like explored and thank you and the timing
[23:59]to get to talk with you is just so perfect in that way. Maybe kind of like the way you
[24:04]felt when you were in Oberlin. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi,
[24:14]formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[24:18]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at zibiowans and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[24:25]Oh and bye the books.