"This is the story of what happens when a big heart meets an iron will. Nancy Brinker will make you sit back in wonder."

KELLY CORRIGAN, bestselling author of Lift and The Middle Place

"Impossible to put down."
NEW YORK TIMES

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Book sales benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure, so please tell a friend, post a review on Amazon, read Promise Me with your book club, give it as a gift, and help us spread the word!

Nancy gets up close and personal with Promise Me readers


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Meet the real Suzy Goodman Komen

Susan G. Komen: the name has become an icon. For hope. For action. For those at the front lines of the battle against breast cancer. But who was the woman behind the icon?

In the pages of Promise Me, you'll finally meet the real Suzy. Great care was taken to create scenes and dialogue using Suzy's own notes and letters to her family. The words are her words. The voice you hear is the real Suzy. Once you've come to know her, you'll remember her for how she lived, instead of how she died. And you'll never look at a pink ribbon in quite the same way.

From Promise Me:
"Suzy wasn’t serious or “bookish” like me, but all her teachers loved her, and I always thought of her as the smart one. In addition to her savant silliness, she was gifted with emotional intelligence, empathy, our mother’s generous heart, an unfairly fabulous sense of style, and a humming, youthful happiness that made her naturally magnetic. She had a shy side, but people loved her to her dying day because she was just so much fun to be around...

...When Suzy was grounded, I was the hostage negotiator. When Suzy exceeded her curfew, I was the peace envoy. When Suzy died, my life’s work was born."

Look for the first pink ribbon hidden in the full-color Promise Me photo section, and click here for bonus photos from the Goodman family album.

Meet Ellie Goodman, Nancy and Suzy's mom

My mother, Eleanor Tressa Neuman Goodman, was born in 1920. Her mother was a founding member of the Red Cross in her community. Growing up during the Great Depression, Mommy was accustomed to sleeping in the dining room whenever some displaced drifter needed a bed for the night. Raised in the Jewish faith, with a strong sense of stewardship and community, she learned early that charity isn’t about performing acts of kindness; it’s about the state of being kind.

Mommy didn’t want Suzy and me to participate in racially segregated summer camps, so she spearheaded efforts to procure the 640 wooded acres that became Camp Tapawingo, an inclusive, educational place where Girl Scout troops still gather to grow and learn. In addition to her organized charity work, she always performed small personal mercies: a casserole for someone just out of the hospital, a freshly folded basket of diapers, the weeding of a flowerbed, whatever she could do to lighten a neighbor’s load. Ellie Goodman always told me and Suzy: “When you see something that needs doing, do it. When you see a wrong, right it.”

After Suzy’s breast cancer diagnosis in 1977, Mom embodied the greatest qualities of a caregiver: patience, strength, calm, laughter through tears, grace under unimaginable pressure. In the decades since Suzy’s death, she's reached out to countless breast cancer patients and their families with that same boundless energy and unconditional love. For Ellie Goodman, faith incites purpose, compassion breeds generosity, and love becomes action. In the pages of Promise Me, she teaches us the very essence of stewardship at its truest and best.

The real story of Susan G. Komen for the Cure begins with Mommy, and she's been with us every step of the way.