Writer and Patient Advocate Musa Mayer

Musa Mayer's memoir explores her relationship with her father, painter Philip Guston. Mayer and Guston were close; she says she was his confident. But Mayer didn't really know who he was as a person until she interviewed family members after Gunston's death.

Dr Barron Lerner writes of how science and culture influenced the battle with breast cancer in the new book, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America. (Oxford) He writes of how the once-accepted practice of the radical masectomy gave way to lumpectomy and radiation and of how women activists helped alter the way doctors treated their patients and their cancers.

When Ursula Seinige started her surgical residency, not much about breast cancer was known. In the early 80s, more treatments were developed, like the modified radical mastectomy. Two and a half years ago, Seinige was diagnosed with breast cancer. She joins Fresh Air to discuss her own treatment, as well as her role in a support group she founded for survivors of the disease.