This book is also about cancer. It has a completely different tone than the last one. The author’s personality is pretty much a polar opposite, she was an actress (teaching children theater classes, doing voices on the air, commercials, etc) married in a loving relationship with two children when cancer struck. It’s so similar to the last read in terms of describing the shock of diagnosis, the difficult treatments, the awkwardness of people not knowing what to say, absolute drain of being so ill for so very long. The strangeness she felt when it seemed to finally be over: she’d made it, she’d survived, but fighting off cancer had consumed her life for so many years- nothing felt the same. Unlike the prior read (I can’t help compare the two so closely)- which seemed to take place in solitude and hospital stays, not much family present in the book- this story is permeated with the author’s family. How terribly hard it was for them. How confused her young children were about some things, totally accepting of others, angry when she was unable to care for them, and so on. All the ups and downs, how they made it through. Especially with her husband. I admit, some of the parts about how cancer treatment affected their love life was told a bit too intimately for my taste! And for such a very long time her relationship with food was affected afterwards. What it’s like to go through this illness and survive it is described in such brutal detail, it can be hard to read- but it’s all lightened by her humor. Jokes everywhere. They didn’t always make sense to me (or make me laugh), but still I think this book might be a keeper, to stay on my shelf, just because it’s such a contrast to the other. Something else took me by surprise- her exploration of faith didn’t bore or exasperate me (my usual reaction nowadays to reading someone’s religious effusions). What she said made sense, I respected and appreciated how she worked her way through re-evaluating life, and also explored some alternative ideas and views along the way (once consulting a shaman, another time visiting a naturopath, for example). It’s a very candid, forthright story about one woman’s journey through the black gulf of cancer and out the other side.
Parallel read: Autobiography of a Face
