Assembling the stories took about a year and a half. The book includes her own account of the impact of heart disease in her life. Her mom died of a heart attack at age 40 in their Brooklyn home when Dr. Guarneri was only 8 years old. Almost 10 years later, her father died of heart disease.
“Part of the reason I became a heart doctor was to overcome the powerlessness I felt as a young girl that night in Brooklyn when my mother was taken from me,” she writes in her book. “Perhaps by becoming a cardiologist, I was trying in some symbolic way to reach back in time and heal the hearts in the middle of my family that had stopped beating far too soon.”
Dr. Guarneri advises aspiring physician writers to keep a journal. “Start to put your thoughts down, even if it's a little bit every day,” she said. “Take what your passion is and write from there. Don't write for anyone else but you. I wrote this [book] for me. I never intended to publish it. I was amazed how Simon & Schuster bought this book in less than a week, because it never occurred to me that a physicianhadn't done anything like this before.”