Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer

A powerful collection of nonfiction on the experience of breast cancer by accomplished women writers-thoughtful, moving, and reparative. Essays, personal narratives, an interview with breast cancer specialist Dr. Susan Love, and more. In the United States, every three minutes another woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. Why is an experience so common and transformative so notably absent in contemporary literature? Where are the writers living with breast cancer? In this anthology of mostly original pieces, fifteen women writers accept the risk breast cancer brings and use it in their work. In personal narratives, essays, shaped journals, and poems, they make art that not only articulates the substance of their experience but also expands and repairs conventional images of their bodies and their lives. In making narrative, in using language, in thoughtful analysis, these writers find joy. In the discovery of what is true, they find hope. The pieces are wide-ranging: from the immediacy of poet Marilyn Hacker's journal entries to Judith Hall's researched account of nineteenth-century novelist Fanny Burney's mastectomy without anesthesia; from explorations of relationships of mothers and daughters at genetic risk by fiction writers Annette Williams Jaffee and Claudia MonPere McIsaac to issues of racial identity addressed by poet Safiya Henderson-Holmes and scholar Amy Ling. Carol Simmons Oles's essay on the problems of conventional medical care is accompanied by her interview with breast cancer surgeon Dr. Susan Love, under whose aegis the boundaries of care are rearranged. Also included are distinctive personal essays on how illness affects friendship, love, work, appearance, and more by Carol Dine, Elaine Greene, Maxine Kumin, Alicia Ostriker, Pamela Post, and Mimi Schwartz; previously unpublished letters of Lost Generation novelist Kay Boyle that show the intersection of the personal and political; and a powerful cycle of poems by Lucille Clifton. An introduction and biographical notes on the contributors are included.