A Vancouver woman had an inside look at the decade of effort and angst that went into Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”
Betsy McCarthy is not an editor or a literary agent. She is Skloot’s mother.
The significance of that relationship is underlined when you check out the book’s dedication page. Skloot’s parents — McCarthy and Floyd Skloot — are first on the list of family members the author thanked.
Skloot will be in Vancouver on Wednesday to headline the Fort Vancouver Regional Library Foundation’s fundraising event.
McCarthy is pretty familiar with the story — both stories, actually: “The Immortal Life” as well as Skloot’s own experiences writing it.
“I, and the rest of the family, lived through it. Ten years of research, and several publishers,” McCarthy said.
One editor told Skloot to cut out the multigenerational saga of the Lacks family and focus on science and the disembodied HeLa cancer cells.
“She went through quite a bit to break the contract.”
In addition to lots of support from her parents and their spouses, as well as her brother and his family, Becka — as McCarthy referred to her — had other home-grown benefits.
McCarthy’s dad, James Robert Lee, “treasured books more than anyone I’ve known,” Skloot said in her dedication.
“And he’d read to her,” McCarty said.
McCarthy’s own careers represented elements that are reflected in Skloot’s science writing. McCarthy, who moved to Vancouver in 2003 with her husband, Terry, taught English at Southern Illinois University for three years. Then she changed career paths and became a health care policy administrator.
So even though McCarthy knows the story, she definitely will be at Wednesday’s event to hear her daughter speak. There’s really more to it than that, McCarthy noted.
“I’m her date.”
