GIVE ME ONE WISH: A True Story of Courage and Love

Gordon's first book is a tough, loving, passionate remembrance of her daughter's battle against cystic fibrosis. In the early 60's, Gordon and her then-husband, Jerry, were playing the game of becoming artists in Greenwich Village: Jacquie (from a well-to-do Darien, Conn., family) sang at the Gaslight Club; Jerry was an actor and puppeteer. But in 1965 they learned that their always-sickly four-year-old daughter, Christine, had cystic fibrosis (a lung disease, always fatal, in which the patient's lungs fill up with mucus that cannot be expelled). The next 17 years of Christine's life were a constant struggle against death: she had to sleep in a tent full of ""mist"" to keep her lung secretions soft; she was forced to undergo a series of theraputic ""thumpings"" (basically, chest poundings to loosen the mucus) every day; there were increasingly frequent episodes of internal bleeding that put her into the hospital. Yet Christine survived all this, her mother's three marriages, and separation from Jerry (who became a famous puppeteer for The Muppets) and had a successful adolescence. She was a star at Rye County Day School in Connecticut--falling in love, singing in a punk-rock group--and her journals (liberally quoted) are marvelously poignant: ""My dreams seem so far away now, so distant. Life these days is a constant limbo, neither here nor there."" When she finally dies--in 1982, at age 21--the reader is nearly wrung out of emotion. Unusually well-written for this genre, and genuinely moving as well.