Tina Ballerina: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and New Beginnings

For readers of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Tina Ballerina is a five year chronicle of a marriage tested by terminal illness. The summer of 2009, Christine Mara discovered a lump in the shower of a rented house in Stowe, Vermont. What followed was five years of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, recurrence, and a decision made in a doctor's office in April of 2014 that only two people in the world knew about - until now. Tina Ballerina is the story of a marriage, a family, and a woman who met every version of the worst news a person can receive with clarity, humor, and an unshakeable sense of who she was. Written by the man who was holding her in his arms when she died.