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On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy—self-made principal of Guthy-Renker, the infomercial marketing giant—Victoria’s most treasured role was mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson.
Suddenly, Victoria’s dream life is broken as she begins to battle a mother’s greatest fear.
In 2008, her daughter, Ali, began experiencing unusual symptoms of blurred vision and an ache in her eye. Her test results led to the diagnosis of a disease so rare, the chance that she had it was only 2%. Neuromyeltis Optica (NMO) is a little understood, incurable, and often fatal autoimmune disease that can cause blindness, paralysis, and life-threatening seizures, and afflicts as few as 20,000 people in the world. At the age of 14, Ali was given a terrifying prognosis of between four to six years to live.
OUR 2% LIFE: Saving Each Other, Finding Ourselves—A Mother/Daughter Journey begins just as Victoria and Bill learn of Ali’s disease. With no cure or research facility in place for the disease, Victoria boldly declared: “If 2% got us into this, then 2% will get us out.” And so began a powerful journey to save Ali, her only daughter, including bringing together a team of more than fifty of the world’s leading experts in auto-immune and NMO-related diseases to create the Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation.
Told in alternating viewpoints, Victoria and Ali narrate their very different journeys of coming to terms with the lack of control that neither mother nor daughter have over NMO—mirroring the unpredictable and random nature of their 2% lives—and their pioneering efforts and courage to take their fight to a global level.
Bringing their story to light with raw emotion, humor, warmth, and refreshing candor, OUR 2% LIFE is the extraordinary journey of a mother and daughter who demonstrate the power of love to transcend our greatest fears, while at the same time battling to find a cure for the incurable.
Overview
On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy—self-made principal of Guthy-Renker, the infomercial marketing giant—Victoria’s most treasured role was mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson.
Suddenly, ...