Last month we had the opportunity to hear from Diana Raab, author of Healing with Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey, in both an interview and a reprint of her essay on How Writing Heals (see September 01 post).  Today we will review her cancer memoir, her sixth book.

Writing is very essential to the author’s life and thus became central to how she dealt with her diagnosis of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) breast cancer.  Early in her life Raab worked as a nurse before she turned to medical writing and poetry, eventually completing a Master’s in Writing degree after her successful fight with cancer in 2003.

Those influences are what make her cancer memoir a bit unique.  Interspersed with her illness narrative are a series of poems, perhaps the most interesting of which is entitled A Woman’s Life, a series of thirty-seven verbs tracing the progression of a female life.  At the end of each chapter is a series of open-ended questions in which the reader is invited to write down their own experiences mirroring the chapter’s focus – consult, biopsy, making decisions, etc.  These sequential exercises underscore Raab’s belief in the healing power of journaling and provide the book’s strongest appeal.

The narrative itself is slim, personal, and accessible, written in a very expository style.  She catalogs the various steps in her journey – mammogram, diagnosis, needle biopsy, surgical biopsy, surgery, recovery.  Thus the book will be most useful for fellow women diagnosed with DCIS.  While the writing is always clear, it is in her poetry that Raab seeks to explore the deeper ramifications and interpretations of her cancer experience.

Appendices include sections on writing and healing , meditation, a glossary, and a list of cancer resources.

www.dianaraab.com

www.wow-womenonwriting.com

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My long delay in posting is really inexcusable.  The advent of Spring, sinus issues, and spending time with the girls outdoors.  But today is rainy (gardeners rejoice!) and Sophie and Isabel are not due for a couple of hours.

The Leisure Seeker is a work of fiction, one of the few such books I have reviewed though cancer movies are invariably fictional.  The support group book club I attend discussed this book last month.  Although in no way a cancer memoir, the novel deals with relevant issues of marriage, aging, deteriorating health and promise keeping.

Michael Zadoorian, the writer, is a Detroit native and has written of his city before.  Appropriately then this novel begins in the Motor City.  The Leisure Seeker is a road-trip story so a starting point in the city built by the automobile industry automatically assumes the folk-fantasy of the country’s car culture.

The Robinas are the aging couple who set off on a westward trek across America, tracing the forgotten, abandoned roads of the legendary Route 66.  Their destination – the original Disneyland.  Ella is the brains and driving force of the operation if only because John is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s.  Ella, however, is dealing with her own demons.  She has advanced cancer, probably breast or ovarian – we are never told.

The story is written in the first person, Ella’s, given John’s addled mind.  The couple travels in their aging RV, a Leisure Seeker model, which has served the couple and their two children over the years as they crisscrossed America on vacations that become the stuff of family memory and history.  The children are now well into their adult lives with children of their own.  They are opposed to the idea of this dubious pair traveling alone across dubious roads in a well-worn camper.

Ella acknowledges the couple’s shortcomings but together, she figures, she and John comprise one capable person.  For all his memory loss, the task of driving a van has become almost instinctual.  Ella navigates and makes decisions about stopping for gas, food, and rest.  Their stopping points are the lost way-stations and campgrounds of another era.  Their progress is marked both by the memory of earlier adventures as well as a few new ones.

The story is sweetly told which serves several purposes.  We are drawn into their relationship even as John occasionally slips away from it.  Though Ella shows signs of increasing weariness and issues with her cancer, her inner strength, humor, and general feistiness seems to carry them both forward.  Their relationship appears honest although John does not seem to be aware of his wife’s illness.  Periodically on their journey, the couple yell and curse at each other.

Memories of the past are woven throughout the narrative, serving as an illustrative counterpoint to this closing chapter of an otherwise quiet and inconsequential of a life together.  Their road adventures are all believable, evolving naturally and without exaggeration.  The people they met are equally well-drawn, adding brief color and insight without giving in to a writer’s temptation to populate this kind of story with a series of likable eccentrics.

The tone is sweet.  We grow to like, admire, and empathize with Ella’s losing plight.  Her kids and her doctors want her to return.  But she is looking for a last hurrah, a golden sunset.  Ella yearns for some control as her health and John’s mind slowly, inexorably slip away.  In the last chapter we are grateful for the sweetness of the tale.  It serves to open us to the unexpected and quietly emotional ending.

Perhaps more illuminating of Alzheimer’s than cancer, The Leisure Seeker nonetheless provides meditation for the choices we must eventually make.

Order from Amazon thru this site: The Leisure Seeker: A Novel

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

~ I’ve Loved You So Long – directed by Phillipe Claudel; starring Kristen Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein.  Sony Pictures, 2009.  French with English subtitles.

This picture is strictly not a cancer film, though it easily could have been.  Casual watchers may even make that assumption (I did).  I chose it for review because it deals so engagingly with issues of grief and the loss of a child.  The tension of the movie hinges upon details of the main character’s secret.  That secret is only gradually revealed throughout the course of the film.  Juliette, played by English actress, Kristen Scott Thomas (The English Patient), has just been released after fifteen years in prison.  She is met by her younger sister, Lea (Zylberstein), with whom she has been invited to stay during her transition back into society.  The sister and her husband live in a university town, Nancy, where they are professors.  They have two young, adopted Vietnamese daughters.

Initially we do not even know Juliette’s crime.  In private and heated conversation between Lea and her husband, Luc, we learn the crime was murder.  Understandably he is not comfortable having her in the house.  The reason for her fifteen year absence is kept secret from their circle of friends.  Later we learn that the victim of the crime was Juliette’s six-year old son, Pierre.  Her husband testified against her at her trial for kidnapping and murder.  To this point it is a little difficult to sympathize with Juliette, though we suspect that we will learn to.  Juliette is taciturn, resentful, easily angered.  She keeps everyone, including her sister (and the audience), at a distance.  After the further details of her crime are revealed, it becomes even more difficult to identify with this sullen, seemingly amoral woman.

The emotional strength of the drama centers around the relationship between the two sisters.  After the trial, Juliette’s parents disowned her.  They withheld from Lea the nature of her older sister’s crime and forbade her from writing to her sister in prison.  Lea wants to understand, to restore their relationship, but Juliette seems closed to this.  Juliette engages in some casual, impersonal sex, an expression of her new-found freedom that does not endear her any further with the audience.  Later she establishes tenuous, personal relationships with two different men.  Her motives are suspect though we hope that one of these helps break through her emotional limbo.  Everyone is the film is well cast – the parole officer, a potential employer, Lea’s faculty friends – but the movie belongs to the two women.  Thomas plays her role without make-up, looking plain, damaged, and even a bit frightening.  According to the French cinema aesthetic, long segments of the movie involve shots of her hauntingly sad face, staring and smoking.  The dialogue is somewhat sparse but precise.  Important aspects of the characters are revealed visually rather than spelled out with spoken explanations.

Juliette is not entirely comfortable living with her sister’s family though she slowly, guardedly begins to establish relationships with the young girls and Lea’s father-in-law, rendered speechless by an earlier stroke.  Though we learn that Juliette had been a medical doctor before her incarceration, she is now just looking for a more menial job.  She desires to move into her own place.  Her growing relationship with her parole officer does not work out.  Lea’s fellow faculty member and close friend is attracted to Juliette though he senses the frailty of her emotional state.  We root for this one to succeed and watch it progress albeit subtly and cautiously.

The core of Juliette’s secret is not revealed until close the end of the film.  I will not reveal it here.  When Lea pleads that she could have helped her if she’d known, Juliette responds “”Nothing mattered anymore. I wanted to go to prison. Either way, I was guilty. I’d given birth to him and condemned him to die. And I had nothing to say. Explain? Explain what? To whom? Explaining is looking for excuses. Death has no excuses. The worst prison is the death of one’s child. You never get out of it.”

Thomas’s stunning performance sustains the film.  It is full of nuance and contradiction, mystery and self-loathing.  And yet it is played out so delicately, paced so deliberately, that we hang on until the end, hoping for explanation and redemption.  The movie does not disappointment the patient.  A moving, subtly executed drama.   ***

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