The oncologist does not mince words when delivering the scan report. Good news (“Good Pet”) or bad, it’s the facts minus emotion. December 2016 brought the first bad news since the original “incurable but treatable” diagnosis. My cancer was active: the Nancy in MALIGNANCY. “Whoa” popped out of my mouth involuntarily, as the details of my options hit me. Stop, please, was what I meant. The man took offense: “I am not a horse,” he puffed, though later apologized on email for “snapping,” after I apologized for “whoa.” The moment retains the mark of trauma, and it has recurred, April 2018, along with new activity. A second surgery (best of bad options). This time, the last.
Diary Entry

Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books: the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need, for now, to launch (a k a promote) my new memoir, My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism. Naturally, I inhabit both spaces, which makes for a strangely bifurcated, though far from boring, existence. Click to view both Feminist Friendship Archive and My Multifocal Life projects.