ABSTRACT
Ruth Nadine Picardie was 32 years old when she was diagnosed as having breast cancer. She had been married for only two years, and had one-year-old twins, Joe and Lola. She was born in 1964 in Reading, the daughter of South African émigrés to Britain, and her middle name was after the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. She studied social anthropology at Cambridge University, and then worked as a journalist on the Guardian and Independent newspapers, and also as a freelance writer for a range of periodicals – from Vogue to the Sunday Telegraph magazine. After her cancer was diagnosed in 1996, she underwent extensive treatment, but despite this, the condition advanced inexorably. It soon became clear that her condition was terminal. In her last year, Ruth wrote five columns on her illness for the Life magazine section of the Observer newspaper, and also had an extensive e-mail correspondence with friends and well-wishers from all over the world. After her death in 1998, these columns and e-mails were collected into a book, Before I Say Goodbye, by her husband, Matt Seaton, and her sister, Justine Picardie.
