Two Small Footprints in Wet Sand: The Uplifting True Story of a Mother's Brave Quest to Save Her Daughter

Thaïs is almost two. Like most well-loved children, she is happy. She laughs as she runs on the beach. But her footprints in the sand, with toes turned out, tell a different story. Two Small Footprints in Wet Sand relates the overwhelming tragedy experienced by a family as a result of a genetic disorder.

A true tale told by a mother, it’s the story of a little girl, of family, friends, and the medical community united to define life by its beauty rather than its length. On the day Thaïs turns two, her mother, the author Anne-Dauphine Julliand, learns that her child has an untreatable genetic disease, the rarest of the rare, a silent disorder that will slowly paralyze her daughter’s nervous system and kill her. Metachromatic leukodystrophy—MLD—is the diagnosis. There is no cure.

While the disease may be grim, neither this book nor the people in it are. Grace, dignity, and most of all love mark the lives of all those involved in the care of Thaïs. Julliand does not play down the pain of her child or of her family, or the exhaustion, discouragement, or burden each of them carries. She promises her daughter a full life—not a life like other children have—but a happy life, a life of love. Thaïs’s family and the medical staff around her fight to provide comfort and efficient care, to conserve her dignity, to give her love, to “add life to days when we cannot add days to life.”

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Anne-Dauphine Julliand was born in 1973 in Paris. After studying journalism, she went on to work as a journalist. In 2006, she learned that her second child, Thaïs, was suffering from a rare disease and didn't have much time left to live. She wrote this book after the overwhelming two years in which she and her husband, supported by all those around her, took care of Thaïs. At first, she wrote it for herself, her husband, and her children. Two Small Footprints in Wet Sand became a publishing phenomenon that swept France off its feet and is now a bestseller there.

Adriana Hunter is the translator of works by Catherine Millet, Genevieve Jurgensen, Amelie Nothomb, Viviane Moore, and Louis Sanders.