Gina Frangello

Cancer, I'll Give You One Year

History & Biography

“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.”