City Arts & Lectures
Preview of “Breast Cancer is Boring” Podcast
What We Don’t Understand
Boris is a middle-aged grocer with a stained t-shirt and a big grin. He prefers customers who pay in cash, and he tosses apples to the latchkey kids who come by after school. He donates blood as often as he can. He’s unfazed by needles and knows that his blood type – O negative – is the magic kind that can help anyone.
That’s how I imagine him.
My sister-in-law and I named my anonymous blood donor Boris. The charge nurse who is named after a month that is not April, May nor June warned me I could become cold as his blood first circulated throughout my body. As I watched the beet red liquid slink its way through the plastic tube attached to the port in my chest, I thought of the Buffy episode in which Spike takes Buffy to a brothel where humans pay vampires to drink their blood. I did not get cold.
I needed a blood transfusion because chemotherapy caused my hemoglobin to drop. Hemoglobin is a protein that carries oxygen around the body, and low hemoglobin is related to anemia, a condition I had for a while as a teenager. I don’t remember feeling tired back then, but I do remember applying gold eyeliner before school and my mom shouting up the stairs, “Iron pills!” I didn’t like taking pills. Sometimes I lied to my mom and was mean about it. “I took the stupid iron pills Mom. Why do you always think I’m lying?”
I felt weird about getting a blood transfusion. Who is this Boris fellow and what’s in his blood? The nurse assured me the process of preparing blood for transfer is safe. When she began using words like centrifuge and storage conditions, I realized I didn’t care and stared at the hazardous waste bin.
This was not the first time I didn’t understand something. Most days I don’t understand most things. I implicitly trust the expertise of other people when I drive my car, turn on my stove, and send my children back to in-person school.
The working title of my first novel Edie Richter is Not Alone was You Belong to Everyone. One theme in the novel is that despite whatever intentions we might have to be self-sufficient and independent, we are connected and have a responsibility to each other. This is not a noteworthy observation, but it’s something I felt like exploring.
Now, being treated for cancer, I can’t escape this idea. Week after week, I go to the hospital for everyone who loves me, including, but not limited to, myself. I don’t know how doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide work. I can’t even spell them without googling.
This morning, someone ran a stop sign just as I stepped into the intersection. It reminded me that today, like every day, my life is in other people’s hands.
What I’m saying is that everyone should get vaccinated.
Conditions of Creativity: Rebecca Handler and Vendela Vida in Conversation
LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, AUGUST 6, 2021
REBECCA HANDLER IS a writer who lives and works in San Francisco. Her stories have been published in several anthologies, and she blogs regularly. Edie Richter is Not Alone (2021) is her debut novel — of which, in a starred review, Booklist writes, “Handler’s Edie has joined the ranks of unforgettably eccentric, intelligent women protagonists.” A Kirkus starred review calls it a “tragicomic exploration of the collateral damage of Alzheimer’s disease. […] Handler gets it right from the title on out. Edie is definitely not alone.”
Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of six books, including We Run the Tides (2021), The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (2015), and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (2008). She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, and co-editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (2008). She was a founding board member of 826 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family. Author photo by Lili Peper.
In this conversation, conducted via email in June, the two writers discuss their working methods, the power of setting in fiction, the importance of endings, and the need to find space to write.