Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

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A person's response to cancer reflects that person's personality, their upbringing, and their culture as well as their biology. These differences are what we find interesting about their stories although it may be the universality of the cancer experience that we hope to discover and, in doing so, find affirmation of our own. Cancer blogger, Sandi Wisenberg, happens to be a professional writer. Not all cancer writers are. She demonstrates her talents easily with phrases like - "It's the subtlety of it, as cruel as a mean girl's gossip, almost not there but there."
Her "Cancer Bitch" reads like someone who has thrown herself open to the experience, emotionally and intellectually buffeted by the currents, recording everything just as it washes over her. She takes us through the drama of her diagnosis of breast cancer, her mastectomy and aftercare, fussing with drainage tubes and specialty apparel.
"The Adventures of Cancer Bitch" took an atypical route for cancer memoirs. The tone is very straightforward, cynical at times, whimsical at others. It is largely an unsentimental telling. The author does not appeal so directly to our emotions. Nor does the success of the book depend upon humor. Indeed the prominent variations found in books about cancer experiences fall into either the "cancer profoundly changed my life for the better" camp or the "I had to laugh so I wouldn't cry" school.
The author's strong political convictions prompt her to question the purity of motive of big corporations acting as sponsors for cancer fundraising events, the well-publicized, media-blanketed events that allow everyone to feel good about the 'cause'. Where do the dollars go? research into more effective drugs with ever-higher profit margins? or prevention and early detection efforts? or solving the even more politically treacherous questions about what factors of modern life (shampoos, deodorants, food additives) contribute to cancer risk in the first place. Still...they are raising money to combat the cancer lurking so threateningly in her body. Her political reaction is conflicted.
Later she deals with the issue of pain. "The topic for today is pain and pain - pain that causes weeping and pain that comes from weeping, and how difficult it is to tell the difference between the two." And the pain of depression, "soul corroding depression. The kind of depression where the world seems like a vast desert and there nothing to connect to, to hold onto, that every human in the universe is just a little desperate bucket of misery just going after distraction. And you carry on a conversation in the midst of this depression, but the conversation is going on in a parallel, pretend world, what's real is the feeling underneath you can't shake, that nothing matters. And you can't stand it."
Her anxiety sets in motion a confluence of both suffering and depression. "Underneath the suffering was psychic pain, which is an entity, but I can deal with an entity, it is better than the erosion created by depression, which is more absent than absence, depression is the oxygen-gulping aridness of the world...So there is no part of you left that can slither its way around and get its interest quickened by an idea or person or mind or glazed Moroccan tiles. There is no room for beauty ... There is only the ash that's left after a fire, after a long, long rain."
Everyone deals with cancer in their own way. The way we respond to the experience of cancer is very much mediated by our character, personality, upbringing, and other important life experiences. The author has found an original voice to tell her tale. The author's unique persona is exemplified by the section near the end of the book titled "An Accounting". Many cancer accounts include a "what I have learned" section and "Cancer Bitch" is no exception here. But even here she avoids sentimentality, hilarity, and "tired inspirational quotes". There is real, honest, hard-earned advice here.
"Some people don't know how to react to a cancer diagnosis and will disappear" Many fellow travelers have confirmed this to me. "Don't think about people who died (of cancer)" Your friends will avoid this topic like the plague, and instead will only remind you of all the people who did well. "That you can switch oncologists" is advice that some of us could have, should have taken but for our fear.
"That the person with whom you were friendly, who was there when you received the cancer phone call, will be decidedly unempathetic and in the course of a year, will never ask how you are doing." This may sound cynical, even anger, but honest it is. Too often we do not talk about the anger we are feeling because of the cancer.
When I asked her about her "Cancer Bitch" tag, the author told me in an email "it has allowed me to be more arch and sarcastic in my writing, while at the same time being self-critical. This is especially so when I write about Cancer Bitch in the third person."
"That you prefer medical care by women." It is certainly easy to imagine that, especially for breast, gynecological, and even prostate cancers, the sex of the practitioner might be relevant in how comfortable we feel.
Though Wisenberg does not try to make humor a theme in her writing, she doesn't lack a sense of irony. "That in hospitals they still wake you up to see how you are doing." "That you sister will call you after every chemo" suggest both irony and understated gratitude.
The author ends the book with an account of participating in a cancer march. She suggest that the sponsoring institution might well have a double agenda - not only to honor the survivors but also to advertise its role in combating cancer. Is this cynical? Maybe, but having been on the corporate aide of healthcare, I can attest that visibility at such public events is essential to the public relations concerns of healthcare systems.
In her closing paragraph Wisenberg, again in the third person, refers to herself as "a cynical Cancer Bitch." She resents the fact that no one at her treating hospital "had done anything to commemorate my last round of chemo." But then she imagines that at next year's march, she might bring all her "chemo escorts" to march beside her. "It might be meaningful. It might be festive."

I came to this book by accident... a happy accident! I had read Wisenberg's first book, the linked short story collection, "The Sweetheart is in" about 5 years back - and it really made an impression on me: a fresh voice writing short fiction. It should have been lauded that year perhaps right up there with A.M. Holmes "Safety of Objects" - both were kind of best in show picks for me that year for new writing (Holmes' book of course got optioned into a movie not the equal of its source text... perhaps Wisenberg's new book would have gotten aisle-end retail displays if she too had been optioned by Hollywood straight out of the gate.)

But "Sweetheart" barely prepared me for the raw truth telling that I found in "Adventures of Cancer Bitch." If you liked Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" or Alfred Kazin's "Walker in the City," Wisenberg's "Cancer Bitch" is the 21st century inheritor to the throne in the memoir milieu.

We are deeply rooted in sense of place (Chicago's Wrigleyville), in sense of time (2006-2007 - on the eve of political change pre-Pres. Obama), and in sense of those who share Sandi Wisenberg's nitty-gritty reality of living with cancer (her husband, her best friends - who she shepherds through their own ordeal with M.S. and the loss of one of their children to cancer years earlier). Cancer is what happens to you when you are making other plans, and no where is this more clear that in Wisenberg's books. Yes, cancer, but first, the dishes, and the writing students she is preparing to teach, and the reviews she has to write for print, and the (telling) visits from her mother, that give us a sense of the strong older women Wisenberg is growing into one day - years after cancer in a memory.

There are images I will never forget: the lotion as compassionate salve her neighbor's child is ailing in bed, the drunken Wrigleyville frat boys who shout out to her as she walks home with messages emblazoned in henna on her shorn head, the sight in the wastepaper basket in the Nicaraguan school bathroom where she taught at the end of the 80s (i'll say no more), the gentle catch-and-release of a spider (perhaps cancer inspired buddhist thoughts of interconnection), and moreover the visions of her painful struggle where alas she relents to the pain when need be - but never gives in to the cancer apologists like Sheryl Crow who say maybe this is an internalization of lack of self love & acceptance (rather than a confluence of environmental factors, pollution, the American animal based diet, etc).

Through the book, Wisenberg goes on a journey of intimate self love and acceptance of her one human body in a way I think one could only do when sticken with something like cancer. In giving up a part of herself, a literal part of herself, she gains a strength and resilience by the end of the text that is the hard fought gain of only cancer survivors.

I hope to never have cancer or personally have anyone I know stricken with the disease, but if that misfortune ever fell on us, I'd have to give others copies of this book to give them some hope through the darkness.
Audre Lorde's text in 1980 has found its 21st Century equal - and its name is "The Adventures of Cancer Bitch." A definite must read for women (& men).

Life goes on during cancer treatments, and Wisenberg shows that a sense of humor is an advantage. Her thoroughly engrossing book chronicles the ups and downs of treatment and more--being a wife, friend, daughter, teacher, and discerning observer of the absurdities of contemporary life. This is a captivating read!

The thing about Cancer Bitch is you don't have to worry about getting pep talks or anything soft or fuzzy from her. Some people want that sort of thing. But for my money, I like the pure intelligence of Cancer Bitch, the willingness to take on the bitch mantle and everything that goes with it.

"I was unsure whether this book would be angry and "radical" but it isn't. It is very much "life" like--ugly, fun, irreverent, holy. I related to some of her musings very well, others not so much. But, it did bring some questions into focus for me. And, clarified some of my own concerns. Well done."

"The Adventures of Cancer Bitch" started as a blog, much like the famed "Julie & Julia" but there is much more truth and passion in Cancer Bitch. Wisenberg is a well known creative nonfiction writer here in the Chicago area. She has an unconventional writing style that is well served in this personal narrative of the difficult choices, procedures, and healing required during her cancer struggle. We all wish her well and are greatful for her honest portray of the realities of the medical system, even at a "Fancy Hospital."

Helen Gallagher
Release Your Writing: Book Publishing, Your Way

An honest, straightforward recollection of a difficult journey in one woman's life with cancer. The book is written with compassion and and humor but without self-pity. It would be helpful to any woman facing cancer, especiallly breast cancer. I highly recommend it.