Cynthia McGrath has always followed her heart — and at one point, the Grateful Dead. “I had started beading before college as a hobby,” Mrs. McGrath recalled in a telephone interview. “It was a way to make enough money follow the Dead around. That’s how it started in the very, very beginning. I was a little hippie and I would make these beaded necklaces I had made on a piece of velvet cloth. People would come and buy my stuff and then later on I’d get to see them dancing, wearing my stuff.

It was the seventies, and Julie Robinson was 27, divorced and “trying to figure out what the heck to do with myself,” as she puts it now. “I wanted to do more with my life.”

Unfettered and newly a member of the women’s liberation movement, she drove out to California to visit a friend on her boat. “I met my husband, Dennis [White], on the boat next to ours,” she recalled, perched on a plush sofa in a back room of her business, Julie Robinson Interiors.

When Elizabeth Murray was 16 years old, she had already seen far too much of the unforgiving side of life, and she had begun to ask herself if what she knew was all there was. What she knew was that she’d recently buried her mother, who died of AIDS, in a donated pine box with her name misspelled on it. Mr. Murray’s addict father, who was suffering from AIDS himself in a homeless shelter elsewhere in New York city, could not attend. Ms. Murray herself had dropped out of high school and was homeless.

Growing up, Todd Christy watched his father go through his early morning coffee ritual on a daily basis. “He would grab a mug of day-old coffee, nuke it, and slug it down. Then he’d be out the door,” Mr. Christy said. “And that was my early experience with coffee. Just something to get or keep you going.”

Each year 200,000 women and men are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States alone. Erin Kokoszka has felt this statistic personally. “My maternal grandmother and all of her sisters have been affected by breast cancer,” she said. “My grandmother is a survivor and her other living sister is a survivor, but she’s lost two sisters. My two great-aunts have both been killed by the disease.”

M elissa Breese has long known how to match a piece of art with a collector; she sold her first painting at age 15, working at her parents’ gallery, which they ran for 30 years. “I received quite an education from just learning about what I was always surrounded by,” she recalled, dressed every bit the New Yorker in black leggings, black boots and a grey sweater.