The Unwinding of the Miracle summary

For most of us, an attempted infanticide would be the most dramatic episode of our lives. For Julie, though, this was just the beginning of a remarkable life story. 

In 1979, Julie and her family decided to escape Vietnam. The situation in the country had become intolerable for them, due to extreme poverty, widespread violence and the confiscation of their assets by the government. It was time to search for a better life abroad, in a country where Julie could receive medical treatment for her eyesight.

Growing up as an immigrant is hard enough – especially when someone has to do it in a country with a dramatically different culture than the one she comes from, with parents who barely speak English. All children are discovering who they are and finding their place in the world, but for immigrant children, this is an especially tricky process. Their identities straddle two different worlds, leaving them with a sense of never completely belonging to either. 

Add to this situation a legal blindness, school bullying and low expectations from her family. But Julie didn’t buckle under the weight of these burdens – she blossomed. 

Alas, as anyone who has gone backpacking knows all too well, wanderlust doesn’t pay the bills. After traveling widely after college and law school, Julie needed to return to the US and build a career. Her life would still be peppered with solo adventures to distant lands, but now they would be structured around vacation days and holidays.

In 2002, Julie moved to New York City and joined the law firm Cleary Gottlieb.

Most of us have attended a wedding. Usually, they’re a place for unbridled joy, filled with love and life-affirming vows, food and drink, music and dancing. When Julie’s family gathered for her cousin’s wedding in LA in the summer of 2013, they thought this one wouldn’t be any different. But it was. 

That’s because this wedding was overshadowed by Julie’s diagnosis of colon cancer.

Once diagnosed with cancer, a person is unalterably changed – not just physically, but mentally too. The prolonged death sentence of terminal cancer patients takes a massive psychological toll – taking them on a roller coaster ride that climbs to the giddy, misleading heights of hope and plummets to the stomach-churning depths of pure, unadulterated fear. In her journey through cancer, Julie experienced the full spectrum of human emotions – and she had a stormy relationship with hope in particular. 

Never one for clichès or platitudes, Julie disliked how frequently the term “hope” was invoked. Phrases like “there’s always hope” and “you mustn’t give up hope” feel like empty words, used to fill the silence. And hope can be deceptive; believe in it too strongly, and hope takes on the aura of religion. People start to believe that hope is all it takes to be cured.

In late 2014, over 18 months after her diagnosis, Julie’s cancer wasn’t yet terminal. Yes, she had stage IV metastatic colon cancer. Yes, her odds of survival were low. But what were the odds of her surviving her grandmother’s murderous scheme? Or of escaping poverty and becoming a lawyer? For Julie, odds never mattered.

Then, in December, 2014, she received the worst piece of news in her entire battle with cancer.

It’s hard to imagine the mental expedition terminal cancer patients must embark on. It’s one of the hardest journeys a human can undergo. But after climbing dizzying mountains of hope and crawling through deep ravines of despair, patients must come to terms with cancer and accept their mortality.

Julie’s acceptance of her own mortality was accelerated by her particular illness. Not content with stopping in the colon or lungs, her cancer spread to her liver in 2017. Another vital organ had fallen to the cancer’s onslaught; the end was near. Julie was in constant pain from radiation treatments.