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Breast Cancer Isn’t Always a ‘Battle’
Two new books about breast cancer look at the disease in a different light
Earlier this year, I was having drinks with my friend L. We hadn’t seen each other in quite a while because she had moved out to the West Coast, while I still live in New York. We were already close, but our friendship grew more rooted when she and I were diagnosed with breast cancer within weeks of one another during the summer of 2016.
Having each other as sounding boards to share fears and commiserate about surgery and treatment aftermath and side effects helped immeasurably. But what struck me then, and what I brought up again over cocktails, was how specific and individual our experiences were, and how “breast cancer” isn’t some monolith battle to be conquered and survived, but an illness to be treated and managed, subject to so many other internal and external forces.
Why, I wondered, and L. concurred, is American culture so obsessed with public displays of victory when the truth is so much more complicated and contradictory? Each of us emerged from our time in the Cancerland trenches thinking, yes, this was unpleasant, stressful, debilitating, and demoralizing, but there were also far worse experiences. Was breast cancer as big a deal as people liked to believe, or were we each minimizing what had happened to better survive our respective futures?
Later, upon returning home, I kept thinking about that discussion with L. and how I thought I might find the answers to my questions where I always find the answers to my most pressing questions: in the pages of books. The literature on cancer, I discovered, was plentiful, but its contents were frustratingly sparse, heavy on firsthand experiences delivered with a dollop of self-help empowerment or from doctors opining on best practices from some mythical mountaintop.
“There seemed to be very little I could do to participate in my own care. I merely submitted to a largely effective regimen that is the result of decades of trial and error.”
I could, and did, take comfort and find solace in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer…
