Sophie's 5!

I have received a number of books recently that I hope to review in the coming months.  Since we have added so many new blogs since last year and have new readers, I am considering another shot at our Cancer Book Club.  I know people were participating but it was hard to determine how many and how consistently readers checked in.  Comments were consistent but few in number.  We did have good participation from most of the authors, even the actor Evan Handler.

I may try to think of different formats.  Last year we did a book a month, dividing it into four sections with a discussion each Monday.  I may try just one monthly discussion.  I might also investigate a forum mechanism.  Another idea would be a follow-up interview with the writer based on my questions as well as questions from Being Cancer Network readers.  I will be re-posting the Book Club page under the “Community” heading.  Take a look and let me know what everyone thinks.

In the meantime, these are some of the titles that have arrived in my mailbox:

~ Home Before Dark: a family portrait of cancer and healing by David, Kate, Michael and Sam Treadway.  This is a story of a psychologist and his physician wife, and how they and their adult children deal with his diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

~ From Incurable to Incredible: cancer survivors who beat the odds by blogger Tami Boehmer.  Tami is a two-time breast cancer survivor.  The book tracks the stories of twenty-seven survivors with different types of cancers.

~ Breastless in the City: a young woman’s story of love, loss, and breast cancer by Cathy Bueti, another cancer blogger.  The subtitle pretty well sums it up.

~ Stand By Her: a breast cancer guide for men by John Anderson.

~ Cancer Healing Odyssey: the remarkable story of Sun Hee’s ongoing recovery from stage IV ovarian cancer by Sarto Schickel.  A Korean woman, her American husband and their story of conventional plus alternative healing approaches to a dire diagnosis.

~ Killing Cancer: the remarkable anticancer effects of antidepressants by Julian Lieb, MD

My life searches for normalcy, a theme familiar to readers.  The publishing schedule that I so optimistically established months ago is more difficult to follow than I thought.  Fevers, fatigue, and family make for compelling detours.

But finally we return to Called Back, Mary Cappello’s meandering meditation on her breast cancer experience.  Readers looking for a start-to-finish, diagnosis-to-remission story will be disappointed.  The book is cut from a different mental fabric.  This is not a narrative about her cancer experience but rather a personal exploration of hidden meanings and symbols suggested by the nature of the disease and the idiosyncrasies of her treatment.

While the final two chapters are devoted to chemotherapy and then radiation treatment, the two therapies serve only as a launching point for the author’s astute though tangential reflections on a variety of unseeming subjects such as the meaning of color in life and in illness or the perfection of flowers.

Cappello writes in a kind of prose/poetry, words dense but at the same time lyrical, words that are precise though sometimes obscure.  She clearly loves language not only as a descriptor but as an exploratory tool, a manifestation of her commitment to semiotics.  But this kind of writing demands more from the reader.  And I suspect that readers  deep into their own cancer treatments will find the task all the more daunting.

The narrative thus does not “flow” like more ordinary memoirs but rather pitches forward haltingly, stopping frequently to examine words and nuance, then often taking detours further into her consciousness.  She objects to the word “fine” in relation to a cancer patient, finding the term “insultingly inacccurate if not dismissive.  A person following treatment for breast cancer will never be doing fine, though she will be doing differently.” The word “radiation” serves as a stepping off point for comparison to the concept of “radiance”.

The author’s points of reference belie her academic and intellectual background.  Spectres of books, fiction, poetry, and otherwise make appearances in her meditations.  Likewise works of art and of music serve of as vehicles for comparing cancer-related experience.

There is little dialogue in the telling.  And when it occurs, the dialogue is minimal and muffled, appearing only to propel the author’s thoughts toward other, deeper considerations.  Likewise the role of other persons in her narrative again serve as inspirations for analysis.  I was struck by the fact that Jean, her longtime companion, is mentioned only periodically though always with affection but never in much depth.  It may be that that relationship and its deeper implications has already by examined and deconstructed prior to the onset of her illness, there now being little need to interrupt the present narrative.

At the same time people in the book almost float by, unnoticed, being offered only to illustrate the current introspection.  I was surprised that the person I felt to be most present was her deceased step-father, Sid.  He appears in just a few paragraphs and yet it is the image of this relationship that was most vivid to me.

Near the end of the book, after spending weeks in the radiation therapy, Cappello discourses on the myriad conversations she has had with “fellow initiates”.   “Often in the radiation’s waiting room I experience narratives like this:  people tell me stories with a trundling force, a blast of urgency, breathless accounts of trial without end out of which springs an unanticipated revelation, a conferral, or an annointing, whether I’ve asked for it or not.”

“I write to give form to all that lingers,” begins the epilogue.  This is the author’s contribution to our collective cancer experience.  The book is sprinkled with wise and sometimes ironic insight.  This is not a book to be read to pass the hours while receiving chemo.  It is better to read it in repose, in a quiet, warm corner with a cup of tea, while the demons are sleeping.

Order from Amazon: Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

Days behind again.  Hospitalization taking longer to recover from than I optimistically anticipated.  And our selection, Called Back – My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life,  took longer to read and digest than most other cancer narratives we have covered.  This is, we observe in her on-line interview, part of what author, Mary Cappello, intended.  In that interview she talks about the more typical form of cancer narrative as being “culturally prescribed”.  She notes a certain sameness being offered up whether as a breast cancer blog, self-help advice, or traditional text.  She likened these messages as to narrative Muzak, a restive background mix of moralizing and sentimentality.  Cappello set out to offer readers a different “set of tones.”

Two factors seem to guide Cappello’s story.  One, she is an academic and part of a feminist/intellectual tradition.  Second, her sexual identify as a lesbian has informed her cancer experience.  Although she is a professor of English and Creative Writing, she places her line of thinking under the broader category of semiotics, “the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols…”

It is this focus which slows her narrative down into a kind of deconstruction that stops to analyze the various rituals and texts that codify entrance into the world of cancer and its treatment.  And it is this approach to her experience that makes Cappello’s narrative stand out from others, offering, as mentioned, “a different set of tones.”

“That I have cancer is not new, but it’s news to me….It’s been with me for years, but now it is announcing itself.  What’s new is that it’s readable.  My cancer has become legible.  But evidently it’s been happening, in its own way, silently residing for a long, long time.”

This is a woman who takes Proust (Swann’s Way) to treatment with her and weaves his various ideas about the “anesthetizing influence of habit” into her own approaching encounter with breast cancer surgery, breaking up her own story with periodic Proustian quotations.

“There is no verb in the English language for how a body is forced to comply inside an MRI machine.  “Lolling’ doesn’t convey anxiety’s mutations there, though it does begin to broach the ridiculous suspension of two breasts displayed downward in holes cut in the table.  You lie on your stomach attached to everything and nothing, to the whoosh of air, to a lit tunnel, dark on either end:  you hang onto the movement of your own breathing, knowing if you continue to breathe too fast you’ll dissolve.”

Later she reflects that her surgeon, who had placed her own gloved hands so intimately inside the author’s body in order to gain a palpable sense of diseased nodes, will later rarely even offer the most casual brush of her hand.  Cappello continues to dissect the minutia of her experience, much like her Proust.

I will be interested in hearing you reactions to this interesting book.  The author has hinted that she may join the discussion.  Please read the third chapter, on chemotherapy, for next week.

Settling into the middle third of Kelly Corrigan’s cancer memoir, the balance of back story and current events seems to be shifting toward the cancer story.  At this point, of course, the narrative devotes itself both to Kelly’s breast cancer as well as her father’s cancers – his bout with prostate cancer years earlier and the discovery of his bladder cancer, occuring concurrently with Kelly’s chemo treatment.  One flashback, however, sheds new light on Kelly’s character.  She travels alone to Australia, works as a nanny, making side trips to New Zealand, Thailand, and Fiji.  Only later do we, and she, discover that during her trek, her father is diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer.  Not wanting her to alter her travel plans and return to be at her father’s side, the family decides not to tell Kelli until after she is back home.  There is also the suggestion that her presence during this crisis would negatively add to the family drama

Later she makes another trip, a real trek, to the undeveloped wonders of distant Nepal.  These travels may reveal the more positive and reaffirming aspects of her relationship with her dad, “Greenie” or the “Green Man”, the moniker he has bestowed upon himself.  The confidence that must enable a young, middle class American woman to travel remote areas of the globe can surely be tracked back to her upbringing.  As we discussed last week, she is keenly aware of the effect of her father’s magnanimous personality on her eventual identity.  “He defined me, as parents do.”

With much of the drama being focused on her involvement with her father’s illness, chapters about Kelly’s own battle almost fade into the background.  There are not without eloquence.  She discusses the particular difficulties with chemo therapy, describing them as a combination of pain and fear.  In a scene in which her younger daughter awakens crying at night against her own pain of teething,  Kelly’s mother/survivor instincts emerge.  She lifts the child from her crib to comfort her.  “…when you are in pain, and you see someone else in pain, there is really nothing as satisfying as giving them comfort in the night.  I hold her for a long time, in the dark, like sisters in a forest.”

If this is Kelly’s strongest instinct, it sheds like on her later frustration and angst when her father is diagnosed with bladder cancer.  The author is restrained in California by the necessities of her treatment plan.  Her aging father is across the country, the family there seeming to wander the medical morass without a sense of direction or advocacy.  Kelly’s urge is to rescue, to orchestrate her father’s care by telephone, email, and the internet.  Her anxiety swells.  “I am at odds with everyone, and it is making me lonely.  My most special person is dying, and no one is doing anything right.”

This sets the stage for the last section of the book.  Dare we judge Kelly’s emotional dependence on her father?  As presented Greenie is one of those rare individuals that people gravitate to.  His gift was “making people feel irreplaceable.” No one else in her life quite compares with her father, not even her husband, Edward, as he himself confesses one lonely night.  So coupled with her strong paternal bound is also that special feeling of comraderie that we cancer survivors feel for one another.  This is part of the impulse and strength of the whole cancer blogging phenomenon, different perhaps than the more general blogging community that might be seen as more “self-focused.”

Reading Assignment: finish reading “The Middle Place”.  Focus on Kelly’s relationship with her father and her identification with his cancer struggle.

The Middle Place from Amazon