For Love Of Anne

For Love of Anne is Claude de Leusse’s profoundly personal account of her daughter Anne, a child born with a devastatingly rare illness that gradually turned her own body against her. It is a memoir about hospitals, hope and maternal love—and about the peculiar courage required to make ordinary family plans while knowing that the future has already submitted its objections.

Anne was little more than a year old when doctors began trying to discover what was wrong. Eventually she was diagnosed with an extremely rare collagen disorder, caused by an overproductive enzyme and recorded in only a tiny number of children. Medical science could identify the mechanism, give it a suitably impressive name and convene experts around it; what it could not do was cure Anne. This was the important part, although naturally it occupied fewer syllables.

As the illness progresses, Anne’s body becomes swollen, fragile and increasingly dependent upon hospitals, transfusions and repeated treatments. Yet Claude de Leusse refuses to present her daughter as a collection of symptoms wearing a nightdress. Anne is intelligent, sensitive and observant, sometimes remarkably brave and sometimes frightened or fretful—as any child might reasonably be when adults keep approaching with needles and reassuring expressions.

The family attempts to preserve a recognisable childhood amid the machinery of medicine. There are games, jokes, small deceptions, moments of happiness and occasions when everyone quietly agrees to behave as though the next treatment might change everything. Rules are bent, optimism is borrowed and time is treated as something that might perhaps be negotiated with, if only the right person could be found behind the correct hospital desk.

This is not a story in which love performs a convenient miracle. Love cannot reverse Anne’s illness, but it can insist that her fifteen years amount to far more than a case history. It gives her dignity, companionship and permission to remain a child rather than becoming the solemn little saint that adults sometimes manufacture when confronted by childhood suffering. Anne lives keenly within the limits imposed upon her, while her mother learns the impossible discipline of offering hope without being able to promise tomorrow.

De Leusse writes with tenderness but avoids drowning the account in sentiment. The sadness needs no decorative assistance. Instead, the memoir draws its emotional force from ordinary details: the repetition of hospital visits, the family’s precarious routines and the constant effort to place life ahead of illness, even when illness keeps rudely moving its chair to the front.

Originally published in the early 1970s, For Love of Anne is a moving family memoir about childhood illness, anticipatory grief and the stubborn refusal to let a diagnosis become the whole identity of the person carrying it. It is painful, compassionate and ultimately a record not merely of a child’s death, but of the life her family fought to protect before it.

This 1975 Manor Books edition is in Near Fine condition, with an uncreased spine—a notably well-preserved copy which appears to have travelled through nearly half a century with considerably less distress than its readers are likely to experience. A poignant and unusual memoir for readers interested in family biography, medical history and love attempting an impossible job without considering resignation.

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