CHANGING NORMAL

Actress and health and guru enthusiast Henner (Total Memory Makeover, 2012, etc.) teams with her husband, Michael Brown, to recount the odyssey that brought them together—and the horrifying cancer diagnosis that threatened to tear them apart.

In 2003, life for the couple had suddenly turned magical. Friends since college, the middle-age divorcés suddenly found themselves on their first date together, giddy with the unshakable knowledge that no matter how much their lives had diverged since college, they were meant to be together. What Henner—who by that time had built a successful second career as a bestselling author in the self-improvement industry—didn’t know was that Brown had been diagnosed with bladder cancer two years prior. A successful publisher, Brown had spent the earlier part of his life at sea, drinking hard, smoking a lot, eating poorly, and never fretting too much about his health. Remarkably, he even dismissed the cancer diagnosis his nonchalant doctor delivered, even after blood continued to show up in his urine. As author of the Total Health Makeover, Henner was not about to accept defeat, and she immediately set to work getting Brown to doctors specializing in integrative cancer therapies. Faced with the choice of having both his bladder and prostate removed or undergoing a painful and uncertain immunotherapy procedure, Brown chose the latter. He also chose to fully dedicate himself to the diet and nutrition regimen Henner had advocated for years. “The patient that is treated and then sent home to resume their sedentary, toxic lifestyle is being given a death sentence,” Brown writes. Some readers may view the couple’s criticism as a scathing polemic against current medical practices and procedures, but theirs is also a moving memoir about true love and how they managed to stare death in the eye and beat it together.

An inspiring love story wrapped in a serious call for new ways to treat disease.