Reading #edierichterisnotalone and thinking about #alzheimers
— Kimberly Scanlon (@Scanlonspeech) June 28, 2021
“…people who are unpleasant, who are not afraid of conflicts and who show a certain anti-conformity have better-protected brains.” https://t.co/AktNPjEiFW
FeministPress
Everyone Has Cancer
My middle name is Ilse, after my grandmother who sold her belongings for diamonds that she hid in the soles of her shoes when she left Nazi Germany with my father and his baby brother. She had breast cancer. Died before I was born.
My tumor was on the side of my left breast. I wanted everyone to touch it. I kept offering as a teaching moment. “This is what cancer feels like,” I’d say.
The tumor was two centimeters. Peanut-sized. My daughters were once peanuts and now one has a boyfriend and the other has blue hair. This tumor won’t get a driver’s permit because it’s gone now. As is the other one they found after they opened me up and removed all my breast tissue.
I learned about the cancer one month before my first novel came out and scheduled my double mastectomy for the week after the launch. People asked me what the book was about. “Secret keeping,” I’d respond.
People keep telling me it’s not fair. But it is common, and so why not me? One in eight women gets breast cancer. It’s not even that interesting to have it. Everyone seems to have breast cancer or has a sister, mother, or close friend with breast cancer.
After my diagnosis, my family took me to Sonoma for the weekend where we played games, soaked in a hot tub, and drank gin and tonics. When we played Celebrity and my mother got Kristin Wiig, she looked at me in horror. Because, you know, wig.
The surgery took six hours. When my surgeon visited me in the recovery room, she shared that each of my breasts weighed the exact same, a first for her. For a moment, the strange delight of this trivial news overshadowed the pain and pressure I felt with each inhale.
The moderator of my support group put it bluntly: A double mastectomy is a trauma. And your brain might respond as such. My dreams have been frightening. The other night I was running through a city in painful high heels, desperately thirsty, grabbing at glasses of water that kept breaking in my hands.
Last month, I started chemotherapy. Earlier this week, the hair on my head started coming out in clumps. Yesterday it covered the shower floor like a shag carpet. I had underestimated how awful this would feel and sobbed into my husband’s chest. Later that day, I sat in a salon chair as my hairdresser ran the clippers over my scalp. She complimented me on the shape of my head and refused to take my money.
Due to the aggressive nature of my cancers (plural), I am having 16 infusions of chemotherapy. This is what I’m doing this year. I am also swimming, planning a B’not Mitzvah, and watching The O.A. And when I am not suffering from a kind of nausea I can only describe as absurd, I am writing a new novel. This one is about a woman whose life may or may not be a figment of her imagination.
BuzzFeed News
Wendy J. Fox gives a list of new Books From Small Presses That You Won’t Want To Put Down. Family secrets, popular culture, literary experimentation, and more to love in these new and forthcoming books.
Edie Richter is Not Alone
The title character in this novel is a freelancer who is adept at making dull fundraising letters engaging for potential donors. She and her husband relocate from the US to Western Australia; as Edie tries to negotiate life in a new country, she becomes more distant from her husband and enters a conflict with her neighbors. What no one knows is that Edie carries an explosive secret that has followed her to the other side of the world. Handler deftly builds tension with the lush landscape of Perth standing in contrast to Edie’s bleak outlook.
Nancy Scheemaker
Living inside the head of Edie Richter was a wild and unexpected ride.
I was quickly hooked by the author’s marvelous writing style introducing us to Edie in the throes of crisis, while rapidly revealing her quirky, conflicted, hilarious view of the world. And her deep, deep grief. This character portrait is as real as it gets. If you’re in the market for reading a highly original work with a protagonist you just want to throw your arms around – spend some time with Edie.
Reviewed at Northshire Books