[1] Patterson was born in Rome to a Swedish Lutheran mother and Scottish Presbyterian father who both regularly attended church services.
[9] The investigative work on nursing, which had its origins in Patterson's experience of having six operations in eight years resulting from breast cancer,[7] led in 2013 to her being short-listed for the Orwell Prize (Journalism).
[3] In 2010, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an anti-racist watchdog group, selected one of Patterson's columns as among the top ten anti-Semitic incidents of that year.
"[13] Patterson responded to the assertions made by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in a column titled "How I was smeared as an anti-Semite", in which she defended her original prose.
[16] Laura Pullman,[17] concluded in her review for the Sunday Times, "This is a memoir about family loyalty and gut-wrenching goodbyes, but it serves too as a wise guide from someone who has endured more than her share of life’s slings and arrows, and has still come out swinging".