A Gossip Girl's Pregnancy Triumph

TV writer/producer Jessica Queller, who made a splash with her memoir about her preventative double mastectomy, talks for the first time about being pregnant, and why it would never have happened if she hadn’t quit the show.

Last year, television writer Jessica Queller published Pretty Is What Changes (Spiegel & Grau), a nonfiction account of her testing positive for the BRCA-1 gene mutation, which gave her an 87% chance of getting breast cancer before age 50 and a 44% chance of ovarian cancer in her lifetime. She took the test when she was 31, after losing her mother to ovarian cancer at the age of 58. (Her mother had also battled breast cancer.) The book chronicles Queller’s decision to get a prophylactic double mastectomy at age 35, and her struggle to find a partner and have a baby before having her cancer-prone ovaries removed.

"They're gorgeous sorority girls in their early twenties and thirties all having the surgery and going pole-dancing to talk about mastectomies."

What a difference a year makes. In the time since, Queller quit her coveted job as a writer/producer for Gossip Girl to focus on getting pregnant. She became a major presence on the lecture circuit and developed a fan base of women who faced similar, heart-wrenching choices as hers. And now, if Queller were to write another chapter, it would be a happy one: She’s three months pregnant and just kicked off her paperback tour. In her first interview since finding out she’s expecting, she tells The Daily Beast about choosing her sperm donor, the Gossip Girl writers’ room, and influencing sorority girls to have their own mastectomies.

Your book got a lot of attention, but didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. How do you gauge its impact?

I get incredible heartfelt letters. One woman sent me a message on Facebook after hearing me on NPR. She had just recovered from lymphoma and was 35, a Harvard grad. Like me, she had a lot of great boyfriends who didn’t work out and it occurred to her for the first time that she could do it on her own. She went to the sperm bank and is now 18 weeks pregnant. That blew me away. I had to write back and say I’m finally pregnant, too.

Tell me about the bump!

I’m 14 weeks pregnant, by sperm donor 131, or something like that. It took me nine months to get pregnant, nine tries. For six months, I was choosing someone who was brilliant at science and math, the parts of the brain I don’t have, to try to compensate. It wasn’t working. Then I went for someone more like someone I would date: a liberal, artistic, tall, handsome, and kind. He was the winner. He’s an open donor—that means he’s open to being contacted when the child is 18. Ninety-five percent of donors are closed. I didn’t choose him for that reason, but I’m grateful for it.

Would you suggest surgery for any woman who has the breast-cancer gene?

It’s intensely personal and you have to really soul-search to make sure it’s right. I didn’t want to gamble with cancer.

What was it like working on the best television show ever?

I worked on Gossip Girl from Season 1, Episode 1, and I loved the show. It was my favorite show I’ve ever worked on.

Did you know from the start it would become a phenomenon?

When I had the job offer, I had a strong feeling it would be a hit, but I never could have imagined the phenomenon. I knew it was a great pilot. As much as I loved the show, TV writing is an incredibly stressful job. I tried to get pregnant for a year while working and it wasn’t happening. There was no medical explanation except for stress. I was 39. I had been trying to get pregnant since I was 37. I never did I.V.F., which is really expensive, but I was just about to when I got pregnant. No woman thinks she will have trouble getting pregnant. Your whole young adult life, you try not to get pregnant and assume it will just happen when you’re ready. I was stunned when it didn’t.