Pretty Woman

Jessica Queller is the kind of girl we want to hang out with. A bicoastal television writer, she has worked on such coming-of-age favorites as Gossip Girl and Gilmore Girls, she hosts impromptu dinner parties with old pal Calista Flockhart and she's a die-hard Stephen Sondheim fan.

Queller has also faced the devastating loss of her mother to ovarian cancer, and the impossible choices that come with testing positive for the BRCA “breast cancer” gene (at 35, she opted to undergo a preemptive double mastectomy). Her life as it was — and as it has become — is chronicled in her moving memoir, Pretty Is What Changes, in stores tomorrow (the title is a reference to “Beautiful,” from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George).

With bravery, style and healthy doses of comic relief, Queller details not only the medical challenges of her situation, but her quest to maintain her life and sense of self in the face of the big C. Beyond the bodies we inhabit, Queller reminds us, it is the quality of the spirits within that makes us not just pretty, but beautiful.


Pretty Is What Changes will be available tomorrow from Spiegel & Grau.