Sick Chick Lit – Beyond Chemotherapy

The latest commodification of the breast cancer epidemic also heralds a new trend in publishing -- Sick Chick Lit. Yes, breast cancer stories now come between pink paperback covers and feature spunky, cancer-stricken heroines helped along their healing journeys by wise-cracking girlfriends, to-die-for clothes, and the occasional Cosmopolitan cocktail. Geralyn Lucas's Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy -- now a Lifetime movie and Marisa Acocella Marchetto's graphic novel, Cancer Vixen: A True Story, attest to the genre. 

While I applaud these books’ normalization and even glamorization of a terrifying and disfiguring disease, and welcome the dose of humor and grrrrl power, I wonder if the breast cancer experience isn’t being reduced to and defined by a single perspective -- that of the celebrity sub-culture of media mavens. Lucas is director of public affairs at The Lifetime Channel, while Marchetto is a cartoonist for the New Yorker and A-list Manhattanite, married to a celebrity restaurateur. In real life as in print these authors flaunt their guts and glory with bright red lipstick, five-inch heels and designer clothes.  They’re fabulous -- but what do they have to say to the rest of us?

When my best friend had a breast cancer scare a few years back, I went online in search of literary aid, hoping to find something hip and uplifting for my Manhattan-dwelling, clothes-conscious journalist pal to read while she awaited her biopsy results.  I glommed on to glossy magazine editor Katherine Russell Rich’s The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer, and Back, read it cover to cover in one night, and closed the book deeply disturbed. The memoir almost too vividly related the hell of a bone marrow transplant --  not a considerate choice for someone merely in biopsy purgatory. And while Russell Rich was brave and gutsy, she was also the hard-driven epitome of stressed-out New Yorkerdom – a lousy role-model for my friend, who always struggled to balance work, people, pleasure, art and spirituality.

Where, I wondered, are the breast cancer books for people like us? They’re not being published – or rather, they’re not being considered by conventional publishers who declare that readers are only interested in stories penned by those with a “platform,” meaning a media presence as a celebrity or nationally-known journalist. If one relies on the media, women of the so-called baby boom generation are materialistic, self-involved, effortlessly wealthy, jumping from fad to fad in perpetual search of lost youth via plastic surgery and beauty potions, and unable to come to terms with age and mortality. I don't actually know any women like this, but this is the story that's going around and repeated ad infinitum, like a nasty junior high school rumor.

Thankfully, one breast cancer survivor put out her own story between pink paperback covers after being turned down by a host of regretful agents and publishers who praised her prose but bemoaned her lack of celebrity status. Karen de Balbian Verster’s Boob: A Story of Sex, Cancer & Stupidity does more than put cancer in lipstick and high heels. It tells a woman's breast cancer story within the context of an evolving feminist consciousness -- from circle pins and virginity in the 60s, to modeling and bi-sexual threesomes in the 70s, to feminist awakening in the 80s and chemotherapy, motherhood and enlightenment in the 90s.

It's refreshing to spend a whirlwind couple of days (and you will whiz through this entrancing book) with Kyra Copperfield, who survives and lives to laugh about childhood and teenaged sex abuse, Nashville, the modeling industry, New York, self-inflicted sex-abuse in the form of rampant promiscuity in her twenties, a man-moratorium, getting sober, settling down, going on national T.V. to explain how a masturbation workshop gave her sexual sanity, a cancer diagnosis, chemo, running the NY City marathon bald, radiation, early menopause followed by a surprise baby, the emotional and financial ups and downs of being married to an actor, recurring cancer, deepening spirituality while learning to take control of her treatments and every aspect of being a woman, and living life in the present, despite cancer's sword of Damocles hanging over her head.

De Balbian Verster’s fanciful, feminist novel fittingly depicts cancer as a murdering psychopath. Shortly after fictional heroine Kyra Copperfield receives a Stage IV breast cancer diagnosis, she is captured by a serial killer who promises to delay her demise if she amuses him by telling stories about herself. Scheharazade, meet Hannibal Lechter.  As she tells the story of her life, she regains the will to live and finds the courage to escape.

I put this book in the same category as Sigrid Nunez's "The Last of Her Kind" and Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica" -- in offering a view of the last thirty years of American culture -- sexual and otherwise -- from a woman's perspective. It is much funnier than either, but, based on the author's life, never descends into the chic-lit foible of too many wise cracks and not enough substance. All three novels are bildungsromans of young women making their way in the world; though some are blessed with extraordinary beauty, none have the advantage of money, and most refreshing of all -- no one blames their parents.

Kyra comes to understand everything that happened to her, and that she made happen, in the context of what society had to work with the in terms of sexual politics and pop culture. Yes, she even speculates that she may have damaged her immune system by ingesting too much foreign DNA in the form of sperm.

All jokes aside, this book is a deep read that continues to haunt my dreams. So stop reading this review, and order the book!”