Cancer, I'll Give You One Year
A Non-Informative Guide to Breast Cancer: A Writer’s Memoir, in Almost Real Time
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2020
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Publisher's Description
Cancer, I'll Give You One Year: A Non-Informative Guide To Breast Cancer, A Writer's Memoir In Almost Real Time is not about eating kale. The book is 100 percent narrative nonfiction and 0 percent self-help. It was actually written for the author's children in case she died. This sounds morbid, but maybe "pointed" and "candid" are better words. Embracing candor as an aesthetic, this real-time story hits upon the sacred, the profane, a trip to Epcot, a colonoscopy, her kids' responses to everything, and O. J. Simpson's parole hearing. Writing-centric, voice-driven, and conscious of a death sentence--no diets or exercises are offered, but the author may give horrible parenting advice. It's undoubtedly funny, but also a meditation on meaning.
Endorsements (3)
“The truth is, this book that reads like a diary about Spiegel’s ‘cancer-tainted marriage’ comes loaded with knockout punches that will leave readers reeling with awe for her bravery in the face of breast cancer (though Spiegel would probably make gagging sounds over me saying that). The truth of the matter is also that this is a gut-honest book that will make you laugh and squirm and get nose-prickly with tears and want to run every pink-ribboned marathon in support of cancer research. I can think of few other books in which the author has bared her heart as wholly and generously as Spiegel has in these pages.”
“Confronted with a diagnosis of breast cancer, Jennifer Spiegel decides to do what she knows best—she writes her story. It’s an unflinchingly honest story of the fears, frustrations, pains of treatment, and worries of a young wife and mother. Her authentic voice, her sense of humor, and her willingness to acknowledge her flaws make this a unique and beautiful memoir.”
“Jennifer Spiegel is—thank God—an anti-guru. This frantic, real-time memoir contains absolutely zero ‘love yourself’ or ‘wellness’ platitudes and instead burns with panic, rage, body shame, jealousy, exhaustion, nausea, marital frictions and loyalties, the emotional labor and primal urgency of motherhood, and one writer’s obsessive need to document her transformation—to interrogate rather than instruct on concepts of femininity, sexuality, and autonomy. Though Spiegel’s experience with breast cancer is fully her own, her wild, darkly comic and brazenly honest rant is a must-read for anyone who has struggled with the ways illness and body parts inform identity.”
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