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Jeanne Albanese grew up in Staten Island, NY, a die-hard Yankee and St. John’s basketball fan who read the Daily News backwards—sports first. She was inspired by Mike Lupica, Phil Pepe and Bill Gallo. Bucky Dent’s home run and Thurman Munson’s death are seared in her memory. She wanted to be the first girl to play for the Yanks but she couldn’t hit the fastball she decided to write about sports instead, since she loved to write as much as she loved the Yankees.
She attended Syracuse University where she earned degrees in newspaper journalism and English in between long nights working at The Daily Orange. She earned her master’s in magazine journalism from SU while working at the Syracuse Post-Standard. She spent most of her career as a sports writer but also worked in news and features. She won local, state and national awards as a journalist and her work has been listed under Notable Writing in Best American Sportswriting and published in The Healing Muse, a journal of literary and visual arts. She has taught journalism at all levels.
She met Susan Carpenito Heard through the St. Baldrick's Childhood Cancer Foundation. Once she learned about all Susan had gone through, and that her son wanted her to tell his story, she became inspired to write this book. Susan is the Senior Director of Distinguished Giving for St. Baldrick's. Her journals while David was sick provided the backbone for her story.
Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Woman on the Run by Susan Carpenito Heard, with Jeanne Albanese, is a memoir about a mother learning how to keep living after her son David is diagnosed with neuroblastoma at eight. Heard enters his treatment determined to preserve the joyful world he loves, then must find a way forward after his death leaves the family changed forever. Years later, running gives Susan a place to put the grief that has followed her into daily life, eventually taking her from tentative miles to a marathon. When a car collision damages her ankle, she has to rebuild physically just as movement has become central to how she copes. As her marriage ends, Susan receives a breast cancer diagnosis that places her inside the medical system as the patient, bringing her back to the fears she once faced with David.
Susan Carpenito Heard’s Woman on the Run is an exceptional memoir, and Heard writes about David with such affection that he very quickly feels familiar, and I soon understood why he was the heartbeat of so much of her world. I loved how well she captures his humor, like before surgery at Sloan Kettering when he steps from a limousine and tells his surgeon that he looks older than expected. Heard’s candor about herself creates that same familiarity, bringing readers close to the woman behind every mile. Her writing about friendship has so much heart because she understands what it means simply to stay beside someone. In Arizona, Susan does exactly that for another runner through a half-marathon, listening as Jen once listened to her. Well written and deeply moving, readers who enjoy memoirs about rebuilding a life will adore this.
