Photo by Cara Buono

What motivates a woman to have her breasts removed before she even has cancer, and plan to do the same with her ovaries in the near future? For Jessica Queller, a successful TV writer (Gossip Girl, The Gilmore Girls, Felicity and One Tree Hill) and author of the book, Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, The Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny, the answer was simple: her mom.

Queller watched her beautiful, glamorous fashion-designer mother fight and beat breast cancer, only to see her life claimed by ovarian cancer in the end, at the age of 60. Almost a year later, at the age of 34, Queller tested positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation. She wrote that she faced odds of an 87 percent lifetime risk of breast cancer and a 44 percent risk of ovarian cancer. To make her ultimate decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy, she thought of what her mother would have wanted: "Her will to live was so strong and she loved life so intensely that there's no question that my mom would have done anything to live...she would absolutely have wanted her daughters not to gamble with their lives." Her sister also went on to have a prophylactic mastectomy after testing positive for the gene. Now 38, Queller plans to get pregnant before she has her ovaries removed at age 40, and says she has "no regrets."