Photo by Miller Mobley. Lettering by Luke Lucas.
Good Morning America news anchor Amy Robach thrives on telling stories. This year alone she’s covered a long list of compelling ones, from the police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge to the 2016 presidential campaign. Ever since she was a University of Georgia student working at the campus TV station and interviewed the father of a classmate who had overdosed on ecstasy and died, Robach has known that her purpose in life is to cover and share the kinds of events that upend daily life.
As a news reporter, Robach got assignments that seemed to come out of nowhere, calling her to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice. And while she hates to put herself in the narrative, she unexpectedly became the starring character of one of her own stories in October 2013.
At the time, Robach says she felt great physically—invincible, even. So when GMA anchor Robin Roberts tried to convince Robach, then 40, to get a mammogram live on GMA for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Robach hesitated. She didn’t have a family history of breast cancer or any connection to the disease, and she didn’t plan on having a mammogram anytime soon. But Roberts persisted. “She told me that 80 percent of breast cancer patients have zero family history [though the percentage may actually be higher], so [I was] exactly the woman we wanted to reach: the woman who thinks she can’t have cancer,” recalls Robach. “She told me that I would save a life.” Robach relented, and, when the results came back, she discovered what had been hiding underneath her skin: stage two breast cancer that was already spreading to her lymph nodes. “Time was not on my side,” she says. “Thank God I got that mammogram.”
Robach describes the next year as hell. She underwent a double mastectomy in November 2013, followed by five months of chemotherapy. “It isn’t until you’re done with that, that the mental part settles in,” says Robach. “The mental battle is more difficult than the physical one, because you’re always waiting for the cancer to come back.” Robach returned to GMA in December 2013, determined to power through. “You would never know if she was tired or hurting from the chemo,” says GMA chief meteorologist Ginger Zee. “She dove into work to keep her mind and body busy doing what she loves.” At home, Robach also put on a good face. “She never cracked emotionally in front of the kids,” says her husband, actor Andrew Shue. “She kept up an incredible emotional strength, because she knew that the signal to everyone was going to be very important.”
Today, Robach is cancer-free. However, the lifelong battle requires her to visit her doctor at least once every six months for the rest of her life. “I tell myself I’m still fighting,” says Robach. True to her journalistic roots, she chronicled the details of her cancer experience like a reporter and has published a book, Better: How I Let Go of Control, Held On to Hope, and Found Joy in My Darkest Hour. The greater message of encouraging people—especially those who think they can’t possibly be diagnosed with cancer—to get regular checkups and stay on top of their health is resonating. Recently Robach, who serves as an ambassador for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, heard from a male viewer who had a knot in his shoulder that he thought was the result of overdoing it in the weight room. “He said the macho normal him would have ignored it, but he saw my story, went in and it was lymphoma,” says Robach. The man followed with good news: He caught the cancer in time, and it’s able to be treated with radiation. “This man told me I saved his life,” Robach says.
Cancer inevitably serves as a wake-up call to make meaningful life changes one had always intended, and that happened to Robach, a mother of two daughters, ages 13 and 10, from a previous marriage. “It is a constant reminder to live how you want to live right now,” she says. “I have done so many things I would have never done before.” She’s gone swimming with sharks and cliff jumped. “And I’m so much more present with my kids,” she says. “I will sit down and talk with them before they go to bed in a way I never would have before.” Robach now uses all of her vacation—something she never used to do—and has taken her girls trekking through the Belize jungle and around the entire country of Morocco. “I want to see as much of the world with my kids as possible, to show them different cultures and ways of living,” she says.
Not one for sitting around, Robach “thrives on driving up the mountain,” says Shue. To celebrate finishing her cancer treatments in 2014, Robach rented a villa in Tuscany and invited her girlfriends and family. However, she had to leave slightly early when the opportunity arose to interview Malala Yousafzai, the girl who stood up against the Taliban for not allowing girls to go to school and was subsequently shot in the head. “I don’t regret cutting my trip short, because what a story to tell,” Robach says. “I heard from Malala exactly what I needed to hear at that moment, the message of the power of one voice.”
Robach is a Midwestern and Southern hybrid, having grown up in Missouri and Georgia. She chose broadcast journalism since it married her two strengths, performing and writing, and because she idolized her aunt Ann Carter, a career television anchor now working at the Tri-Cities, Tennessee, ABC affiliate. “I wanted to be just like Ann,” says Robach. “She was my role model.”
When Robach talks about chasing stories, the cadence of her voice speeds up. She can remember the tiniest details from her assignments years ago, like the name of the girl who died in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting (Jessica Rekos) whose parents she interviewed, or what the father of the Georgia girl who died from ecstasy was doing when she introduced herself (moving furniture out of his daughter’s house). “Amy has a very strong sense of justice,” says Carter. “That can be a blessing and a curse, of course, but in her career it really helped fuel her drive to get every side of a story.”
With a job that sends her around the globe, Robach acknowledges that work takes her away from her family at times, but that covering gripping world events makes her feel whole and serves as a good example to her daughters. “I told them that to have a happy mom who loves her job is a huge thing,” Robach says. “I am hopefully showing them that it’s not going to be perfect and you can’t have it all at any given time, but at the end of the day if you’re doing what you love, you’re in the right place.”