FROM NYTIMES.COM
Collection CNRI/MedNet — Corbis
By DANA JENNINGS
Cancer is a dark and bleak journey. And the best writing about it, like the best travel writing, brings back rumors and news to us — vivid and unsparing — from a far land that most of us do not ever expect to visit.
EATING POMEGRANATES
A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters, and the BRCA Gene
By Sarah Gabriel
259 pp. Scribner. $25
THE COUNCIL OF DADS
My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me
By Bruce Feiler
240 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $22.99
IF YOU KNEW SUZY
A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter’s Notebook
By Katherine Rosman
307 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99
Such books about serious illness and grief — with cancer, grief always follows, nipping at our hearts — inevitably bring to mind the best of the genre, memoirs like “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion, and “Intoxicated by My Illness,” by Anatole Broyard. Both of those books make the personal universal, are as keen and direct as a boning knife. They understand, as Broyard writes, that “stories are antibodies against illness and pain.”
The authors of these three new cancer memoirs, knowingly or not, employ narrative strategies that distract us from the potentially important stories they have to tell. They use literary flourishes and the tools of journalism as a kind of placebo to avoid delivering the strong medicine the reader craves. When it comes to cancer books, we need the thing itself, not the window dressing.
Sarah Gabriel’s “Eating Pomegranates” is the best of the lot. Gabriel rails at and tries to understand the mutation on the BRCA1 gene that caused her mother’s breast cancer and, in turn, her own — a disease that might leave her young daughters, Michaela and Kitty, motherless, just as she was.
But the book comes swaddled in a very British, sometimes tedious literary voice. Using the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a writerly device in telling a story of breast cancer doesn’t help the reader. It’s almost as if Gabriel believed that purplish prose could somehow inoculate her and her family after the fact from the physical and spiritual pain the disease causes.
When Gabriel, a journalist, lets herself get beyond the notion that she’s writing a cancer memoir, her book shines. She knows profoundly, for example, the outside-of-life life of being in the hospital: “I’m in intensive care, with two nurses to look after me. . . . I am in love with them both.” And: “The clock on the wall says 1 p.m. When I open my eyes again, it says 3 p.m. Where has this gap of time gone? If Time can fall down a crack and vanish from consciousness in amounts of two hours or more, can it be said to exist at all?”
And she writes well about the physical indignities of treatment, about the friends and acquaintances who don’t quite understand: “Everyone’s mother has a friend. They all got breast cancer and they all survived. It was always down to their amazing fighting spirit. And if you don’t exhibit enough of it, and publicly enough, you’re in serious trouble.”
The Council of Dads in Bruce Feiler’s book is made up of the six men he reached out to when he learned that he had a seven-inch cancerous tumor in his left femur that might kill him. Afraid that his 3-year-old twin daughters, Tybee and Eden, would be left fatherless, he asked these men to serve as his voice, his soul, once removed.
In real life, the idea of the council seems to have been a touching and shrewd sentiment. But constructing a memoir around it presents problems. Each of the men sounds like a good guy, but their stories, as told by Feiler, aren’t all that interesting. And given that Feiler is still alive and writing, their presence is a distraction from the heart of the matter: how Feiler copes with his aggressive cancer.
One crucial question to demand of any memoir of illness and grief is, What did the writer learn? And “The Council of Dads” works well when Feiler, the author of the best seller “Walking the Bible,” addresses that question. In those intimate passages, he tells us what it’s like to “walk” Cancer Land.
Much of the book is flat, but the seven sections called “Chronicles of the Lost Year” have more life to them, feel less mediated. Those chronicles grant us the insights of the seriously ill, bear news from a shadowy realm:
“I was forced to lay fallow. I took off the trappings of contemporary life — vanity, ambition, pretense — and entered into a sort of parallel time where I was compelled to do things the Bible envisions. Be needy. Be a stranger. Be uplifted by those around me. Be reunited with the ones I love.”
“If You Knew Suzy,” by Katherine Rosman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, reads like a magazine article that got out of hand. It feels self-absorbed (like a dreary episode of “Sex and the City”), centering on Rosman; her sister, Lizzie; and their mother, Suzy Rosin, who was killed by lung cancer at age 60.
Rosman doesn’t offer many insights in this memoir of grief. Didion, in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” lets us peer into the Möbius strip of the obsessed and grieving mind, admits to us that “grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves.”
Rosman, however, chirpily tells us that on the day their mother died, she and her sister “dug into Mom’s wallet, harvested her credit cards and went shopping” — an argument, I suppose, for keeping all cash and credit cards squirreled away under the mattress when not in use.
Hiding behind her reportorial persona, rather than grappling with her grief, Rosman decides to understand her mother better by tracking down those who knew her. The problem is that Mom often comes across as vain, materialistic and manipulative: “ ‘It’d be very healing for me if you had a baby,’ my dying mother said not once but several times. (Can you believe she went there? Nor could I.)”
Writers are drawn to cancer the way crows and flies are called by a dead woodchuck on the turnpike. It’s up to the author not to turn his or her head away, to look hard at cancer, its treatment and aftereffects, to share with the reader the “hard sweet wisdom” that Didion writes of.
In the end, no matter how well you write, the best narrative strategy is this: Tell the white-boned truth, and try to stay alive.
Dana Jennings, an editor at The Times, writes regularly about dealing with cancer and life after it for the paper’s “Well” blog. His book “What a Difference a Dog Makes” will be published in November.
Collection CNRI/MedNet — Corbis
By DANA JENNINGS
Cancer is a dark and bleak journey. And the best writing about it, like the best travel writing, brings back rumors and news to us — vivid and unsparing — from a far land that most of us do not ever expect to visit.
EATING POMEGRANATES
A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters, and the BRCA Gene
By Sarah Gabriel
259 pp. Scribner. $25
THE COUNCIL OF DADS
My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me
By Bruce Feiler
240 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $22.99
IF YOU KNEW SUZY
A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter’s Notebook
By Katherine Rosman
307 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99
Such books about serious illness and grief — with cancer, grief always follows, nipping at our hearts — inevitably bring to mind the best of the genre, memoirs like “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion, and “Intoxicated by My Illness,” by Anatole Broyard. Both of those books make the personal universal, are as keen and direct as a boning knife. They understand, as Broyard writes, that “stories are antibodies against illness and pain.”
The authors of these three new cancer memoirs, knowingly or not, employ narrative strategies that distract us from the potentially important stories they have to tell. They use literary flourishes and the tools of journalism as a kind of placebo to avoid delivering the strong medicine the reader craves. When it comes to cancer books, we need the thing itself, not the window dressing.
Sarah Gabriel’s “Eating Pomegranates” is the best of the lot. Gabriel rails at and tries to understand the mutation on the BRCA1 gene that caused her mother’s breast cancer and, in turn, her own — a disease that might leave her young daughters, Michaela and Kitty, motherless, just as she was.
But the book comes swaddled in a very British, sometimes tedious literary voice. Using the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a writerly device in telling a story of breast cancer doesn’t help the reader. It’s almost as if Gabriel believed that purplish prose could somehow inoculate her and her family after the fact from the physical and spiritual pain the disease causes.
When Gabriel, a journalist, lets herself get beyond the notion that she’s writing a cancer memoir, her book shines. She knows profoundly, for example, the outside-of-life life of being in the hospital: “I’m in intensive care, with two nurses to look after me. . . . I am in love with them both.” And: “The clock on the wall says 1 p.m. When I open my eyes again, it says 3 p.m. Where has this gap of time gone? If Time can fall down a crack and vanish from consciousness in amounts of two hours or more, can it be said to exist at all?”
And she writes well about the physical indignities of treatment, about the friends and acquaintances who don’t quite understand: “Everyone’s mother has a friend. They all got breast cancer and they all survived. It was always down to their amazing fighting spirit. And if you don’t exhibit enough of it, and publicly enough, you’re in serious trouble.”
The Council of Dads in Bruce Feiler’s book is made up of the six men he reached out to when he learned that he had a seven-inch cancerous tumor in his left femur that might kill him. Afraid that his 3-year-old twin daughters, Tybee and Eden, would be left fatherless, he asked these men to serve as his voice, his soul, once removed.
In real life, the idea of the council seems to have been a touching and shrewd sentiment. But constructing a memoir around it presents problems. Each of the men sounds like a good guy, but their stories, as told by Feiler, aren’t all that interesting. And given that Feiler is still alive and writing, their presence is a distraction from the heart of the matter: how Feiler copes with his aggressive cancer.
One crucial question to demand of any memoir of illness and grief is, What did the writer learn? And “The Council of Dads” works well when Feiler, the author of the best seller “Walking the Bible,” addresses that question. In those intimate passages, he tells us what it’s like to “walk” Cancer Land.
Much of the book is flat, but the seven sections called “Chronicles of the Lost Year” have more life to them, feel less mediated. Those chronicles grant us the insights of the seriously ill, bear news from a shadowy realm:
“I was forced to lay fallow. I took off the trappings of contemporary life — vanity, ambition, pretense — and entered into a sort of parallel time where I was compelled to do things the Bible envisions. Be needy. Be a stranger. Be uplifted by those around me. Be reunited with the ones I love.”
“If You Knew Suzy,” by Katherine Rosman, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, reads like a magazine article that got out of hand. It feels self-absorbed (like a dreary episode of “Sex and the City”), centering on Rosman; her sister, Lizzie; and their mother, Suzy Rosin, who was killed by lung cancer at age 60.
Rosman doesn’t offer many insights in this memoir of grief. Didion, in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” lets us peer into the Möbius strip of the obsessed and grieving mind, admits to us that “grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves.”
Rosman, however, chirpily tells us that on the day their mother died, she and her sister “dug into Mom’s wallet, harvested her credit cards and went shopping” — an argument, I suppose, for keeping all cash and credit cards squirreled away under the mattress when not in use.
Hiding behind her reportorial persona, rather than grappling with her grief, Rosman decides to understand her mother better by tracking down those who knew her. The problem is that Mom often comes across as vain, materialistic and manipulative: “ ‘It’d be very healing for me if you had a baby,’ my dying mother said not once but several times. (Can you believe she went there? Nor could I.)”
Writers are drawn to cancer the way crows and flies are called by a dead woodchuck on the turnpike. It’s up to the author not to turn his or her head away, to look hard at cancer, its treatment and aftereffects, to share with the reader the “hard sweet wisdom” that Didion writes of.
In the end, no matter how well you write, the best narrative strategy is this: Tell the white-boned truth, and try to stay alive.
Dana Jennings, an editor at The Times, writes regularly about dealing with cancer and life after it for the paper’s “Well” blog. His book “What a Difference a Dog Makes” will be published in November.
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