Diary

My Brilliant Friends
As classes begin, I’m reading page proofs for My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the process, especially by the digital exigencies

Last Encounter with the Robot
Since I’m not Pope Francis, what will it mean for me to live with 2/5ths of my lung capacity gone, thanks to my last encounter with the robot

Scanxiety 2
Last year, around the time I created the “scanxiety” collage, one of my tumors started to change size, which led to surgery this past January. A few months

Indelible Memories, Legible Bodies: The Case of Graphic Illness Memoirs
I will be giving a talk on November 20th at an interdisciplinary conference in France (in French, English, and Spanish) with the overarching theme: “Memories, Marks, Imprints.”

Reading Ferrante
It might seem odd to use the word rapturous to describe a reaction to a piece of literary criticism, but I can’t think of a better one to

The Case of the Spiculated Tumor
Just as I was preparing to post this long delayed cartoon, I learned that my cancer was active again. I will no doubt have another encounter with the

Spiculation
After 6 months of “partial remission,” and almost five years of “progression-free survival,” I’ve learned just how partial “partial remission” can be. One of the several pulmonary nodules

The Scan Report
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

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 now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be.