The Adventures of Cancer Bitch » (1)

S. L. Wisenberg is the author of The Sweetheart Is In and Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions. The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tikkun, the New England Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review have published her poetry and prose, and her work has been widely anthologized, most recently in Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, and Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology. She is a codirector of Northwestern University's MA/MFA in creative writing as well as a visiting scholar in Gender Studies at Northwestern. She also teaches at the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies. Her blog Cancer Bitch can be read at http://cancerbitch.blogspot.com/.

Wisenberg may have lost a breast, but she retained her humor, outrage, and skepticism toward common wisdom and most institutions. While following the prescribed protocols at the place she called Fancy Hospital, Wisenberg is unsparing in her descriptions of the fumblings of new doctors, her own awkward announcement to her students, and the mounds of unrecyclable plastic left at a survivors’ walk. Combining the personal with the political, she shares her research on the money spent on pink ribbons instead of preventing pollution, and the disparity in medical care between the insured and the uninsured. When chemotherapy made her bald, she decorated her head with henna swirls in front and an antiwar protest in back. During treatment, she also recorded the dailiness of life in Chicago as she rode the L, taught while one-breasted, and attended High Holiday services and a Passover seder.

Kirkus Reviews

An ongoing blog about the author's experience with breast cancer is transformed here into a deeply personal, often darkly funny memoir. Wisenberg (Creative Writing/Northwestern Univ.; Holocaust Girls, 2002, etc.) takes the reader from January 2007, when she was diagnosed, through surgery, chemotherapy and recovery, closing with a postscript in June 2008. This is not just a survival tale. The witty, opinionated author, a brusque intellectual and a self-described "Costumed Activist," freely shares her likes and, more often, her dislikes, both serious and petty. She has harsh words for the indifference of some in the medical establishment and for corporate-sponsored pink-ribbon campaigns that fail to sponsor adequate research into the environmental causes of cancer. She also scorns women who wear stiletto heels. Readers who want to know more, or to view photographs of the mammary-shaped baked goods at her Farewell to My Left Breast Party, can go to the Cancer Bitch blog. Wisenberg doesn't scant the disconcerting physical details about drains, scars and chemo, and she's equally open about her fear, suffering and depression. Rather than her breast, surprisingly, it's her hair loss she obsesses about. Eschewing wigs and turbans, she has a friend paint swirling designs and "US out of Iraq" in henna on her scalp, an act that says a lot about who she is and how she sees herself. Mostly though, she writes about carrying on her daily life during a stressful time: lecturing, reading, taking yoga classes, dining out with her husband, visiting friends, observing the Jewish holidays. The entry titled "What Is Mine," which names peoples, animals, places and things the author likes and identifies with,seems a tad self-indulgent. Not so "An Accounting," which illuminates and moves as Wisenberg sums up what she has learned from her experience. Tart and scary.