Overview

On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education, she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy-self-made principal of infomercial marketing giant Guthy-Renker-Victoria's most treasured role is mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson.Suddenly, Victoria's dream life is broken as she begins to battle a mother's greatest fear. In 2008, her daughter, Ali, began experiencing unusual symptoms of blurred vision and an ache in her eye. Ali's test results led to the diagnosis of Neuromyelitis Optica. NMO is is a little understood, incurable, and often fatal autoimmune disease that can cause blindness, paralysis, and life-threatening seizures, and afflicts as few as 20,000 people in the world. At the age of 14, Ali was given a terrifying prognosis of four to six years to live.Saving Each Other: A Mother Daughter Love Storybegins just as Victoria and Bill learn of Ali's disease, starting them on a powerful journey to save Ali, their only daughter, including bringing together a team of more than fifty of the world's leading experts in autoimmune and NMO-related diseases to create the Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation. Told in alternating viewpoints, Victoria and Ali narrate their very different journeys of coming to terms with the lack of control that neither mother nor daughter have over NMO, and their pioneering efforts and courage to take their fight to a global level. Bringing their story to light with raw emotion, humor, warmth, and refreshing candor, Saving Each Other is the extraordinary journey of a mother and daughter who demonstrate how the power of love can transcend our greatest fears, while at the same time battling to find a cure for the incurable.

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9781595911445

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Reviews

In this inspirational story, a makeup-mogul mom fights to get diagnosis and treatment for her teen daughter, who seems to have a mystery illness. The family lives in Beverly Hills, 90210, and Victoria worries that Ali suffers from anorexia. Doctors think she may have multiple sclerosis. But it turns out she suffers from an uncommon autoimmune disease, neuromyelitis optica (NMO), which can cause blindness, paralysis, and seizures. Victoria and Ali alternate in telling their story, and both possess plenty of personality. When Victoria offers her horrified daughter marijuana to help her feel better, Ali says, “Mom, get that away from me!” Like a typical teen, Ali adores her mom, though she refers to her as her “Smother Mother.” Victoria and her husband, each an entrepreneur extraordinaire, end up starting a foundation to research and fight NMO. With that kind of get-up-and-go, they vow to help others with this illness, and readers will want to follow in their footsteps. --Karen Springen

Author Information

Cosmetics entrepreneur, medical research trailblazer, and Women’s Hall of Fame inductee Victoria Jackson founded the global powerhouse brand Victoria Jackson Cosmetics. With her creation of the “No Makeup” makeup aesthetic, she irrevocably altered the beauty landscape and became the first person to market a cosmetics line on television. During her decade-long run on QVC, she developed more than six hundred products and generated a billion dollars in sales. Then in 2008, when her young daughter was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder and given four years to live, the mother of three shifted her focus from mascara to medicine. She and her husband, Bill Guthy, founder of the marketing behemoth Guthy-Renker, established The Guthy Jackson Charitable Foundation to fund research on NMO treatments and a cure. Victoria’s unrelenting determination proved effective: In 2016, the foundation developed the first NMO therapeutic, and soon after, three therapies received FDA approval. The unprecedented pace of that accomplishment prompted the American Academy of Neurology to declare 2019 “The Year of NMO.” In recognition of Victoria’s unswerving dedication to the NMO community, as well as her foundation’s groundbreaking research, feminist icon Gloria Steinem inducted her into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2016. The following year at the Vatican, Victoria accepted the Pontifical Key Advocacy Award for her personal and visionary approach to advancing the understanding of NMO around the globe. She has authored four books, including The Power of Rare: A Blueprint for a Medical Revolution. In 2021, her entrepreneurial journey came full circle when she partnered with Ellen DeGeneres to launch Kind Science, a skincare line.

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