“A fine antidote to anodyne cancer accounts.”

rewriting illness

Rewriting Illness

A View of My Own

Benedict, Elizabeth Mandel Vilar Press (216 pp.)

$21.95 paper | May 23, 2023

9781942134916

A New York City cancer memoir informed by Susan Sontag and Nora Ephron.

“I first read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor in 1992,” writes Benedict, “curious about it as a writer and still an inhabitant of the kingdom of the well.” Sontag’s work, she writes, is “a touchstone, a learned investigation on a disease that’s still baffling, still killing.” Benedict chronicles many seemingly mundane activities that assumed greater resonance after her own diagnosis: visiting Zabar’s for chocolate babka when anxiety took away the ability to stomach anything else; picking up a puzzle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop before starting treatment at the facility that treated Ephron; taking a chemo-driven walk through Central Park in the middle of December. These and other aspects of the author’s cancer experience will be less relatable to readers who, for instance, cannot share their pathology report with a good friend who used to run a major New York City hospital. Of course, illness is a great leveler, and privilege neither eliminates the fear of death nor guarantees a cure— though it may increase the chances. As Benedict shows, the “best” doctors still struggle with communication, and even the empowered can lose their voices in front of the lab coat. The author mostly resists the standard tropes of illness memoirs and compiles her thoughts not in chapters but brief episodes, which allows her to explore the range of her reactions to the disease she spent a life fearing. She invokes both the writing and silence of Sontag and Ephron—her cancer “support group”—and sometimes tamps down the emotional intensity of her experiences with analysis or humor. Throughout, there are a host of deeply moving moments— e.g., sharing her diagnosis with her adult stepdaughter or wrestling with the death of a close friend.

A fine antidote to anodyne cancer accounts.

A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Biggs, Joanna

Ecco/HarperCollins (272 pp.)

$29.99 | May 16, 2023

9780063073104

Biggs wonders how to begin again after divorce, turning for advice to the women writers who kept her company through processing her new freedom.

In this mixture of memoir and literary criticism, featuring moments in the lives of writers who thrived in moments of transition, the author begins with a series of rapid-fire questions, clearly seeking urgent answers. To find them, she begins exploring the ways in which the women writers she has felt kinship with have had to start over in their own lives as well as how their work during those transitions continues to help readers through their own rebirths. Biggs delves into the experiences of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Biggs excels at tying the lives and the works of these women together, showing how Eliot was influenced by Wollstonecraft, Woolf by Eliot, and so forth. As a result, the author creates a powerful collective portrait of women writers who are often only studied via their isolated exceptionalism. “Women might draw benefit from thinking of themselves as being involved in a long conversation,” writes Biggs, “in which they both listen and talk, and even manage in this way, over time, to establish a tradition.” Naturally, the author is unable to find answers to all of her questions, but her journey did allow her to cultivate a sense of being free that doesn’t require isolation but instead leans into community—sometimes with the women writers in this book, other times with various people in