Cancer Gadfly
Cancer Gadfly: Walking Back and Working Around
One of the rare pleasures of old age is observing new words jump into circulation. Or appear to jump. We might just have been nodding.
March 30, 2015
Cancer Gadfly
Cancer Gadfly: My Envyometer
There’s lots of writing about cancer―memoirs, graphic and prose, blogs, narratological and anthropological studies, science reporting. Most of the writing is bad, by which I
March 9, 2015
Cancer Gadfly
Cancer Gadfly: Nothing but blue skies…
Little did I dream while riding on the back of a black Triumph motorcycle in Paris that several decades later I would be invited to
December 9, 2014
Cancer Gadfly
What me worry?: Living with the C. Word.
Having cancer is bad enough without being urged to enjoy your diagnosis, believe you can will it away through your state of mind. And it’s
December 2, 2014
Cancer Gadfly
All in the Timing
By the time I was making the final revisions to the Breathless manuscript, I had been diagnosed with lung cancer―“incurable but treatable,” as today’s oncological
November 17, 2014
My Multifocal Life
Infusion for Two
Last week my friend Aiobheann Sweeney and I discovered we were having an infusion (a k a chemo) the same day in the same cancer
May 15, 2014
Friendship
When a Friend You Love is Ill
Right now, I am at my desk preparing my seminar for tomorrow, but my thoughts keep straying from Holocaust testimony―this week’s subject, as it happens―to
March 6, 2014
My Multifocal Life
The Compliment
When friends learn you are in treatment for cancer, naturally they prefer not to believe it. They want to cheer you up. “But you look
May 30, 2013
Paris Memoir
In Search of Lost Time: Checking A Memoirist’s Memory
Paris in January is not anyone’s dream vacation: skies are permanently gray and you have to carry an umbrella. It seems particularly ill timed unless you
February 14, 2013
My Multifocal Life
How Are You?
Bobby Baker’s spectacular Diary Drawings focus on her struggles with mental illness, notably borderline personality disorders. Here, the split experienced in her mind is figured
September 20, 2012
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.