Diary
Scanxiety
“Scanxiety,” a coinage not of my making (I wish!) but that makes the point efficiently, is an attempt to represent the limbo I described in an earlier diary
Partial Remission
After the last appointment (June 2016), my oncologist doubled the time between scans to once every six months from every three. Almost five years later, I’ve progressed, it
Summer Diary: Father’s Day
Today I found myself purging the files from the research I did for What They Saved. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but today I
Is Waiting Also Living?
We wait in our chairs to hear our name called. Some in wheel chairs, Others with carers, canes, oxygen tanks, or neck braces. Soon my turn. —Elizabeth Bishop,
Cancer Gadfly: Still Alive, or The Mortifications of Survival
Readers of the London Review of Books will know that Jenny Diski has been writing diary posts about her cancer for over a year. In “Who’ll be last?”
Losing Friends
I don’t love Facebook, even though I’ve used it, abjectly, to promote my last book. Beyond the obvious embarrassment of self-exposure, the most anxiety-producing feature of the Facebook
Chemo Brain
Most define it as a decrease in mental “sharpness”—being unable to remember certain things and having trouble finishing tasks or learning new skills. When it starts, how long
Cancer Gadfly: Limbo
After a series of stable scans, and almost 4 years of monthly chemo, last week my cancer treatment was abruptly cancelled. No doctors, nurses, blood draws, or infusions,
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.