Truths about Writers: Ann Beattie

1. They take souvenirs of Important Evenings for their “mother.” This is like taking leftovers home for the “dog.” Of course, some mothers do get the souvenirs and some dogs do get the scraps. However, it is not likely.

2. If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.

3. It makes the writer’s day if he or she can include the opinions of a truly stupid character or text in the story, punctuating those announcements with exclamation points, which are the icing on the cake. This situation is to be found in novels, too, but novelists are less likely to be immensely flattered if you have noticed their needle in the haystack(!). For particularly adept and judicious uses of the exclamation point, see the works of Joy Williams and Deborah Eisenberg.

4. Without these things, many contemporary American short stories would grind to a halt: fluorescent lights; refrigerators; mantels. They are its gods, or false gods. In that it is difficult to know Him, these stand-ins are often misspelled.

5. Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.

6. Writers are very particular about their writing materials. Even if they work on a computer, they edit with a particular pen (in my case, a pen imprinted “Bob Adelman”); they have legal pads about which they are very particular—size, color—and other things on their desk that they almost never need: scissors; Scotch tape. Few cut up their manuscripts and crawl around the floor anymore, refitting the paragraphs or rearranging chapters, because they can “cut” and “paste” on the computer. As a rule, writers keep either a very clean desktop or a messy one. To some extent, this has to do with whether they’re sentimental.

7. Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?” An example: stretched-out pajama bottoms imprinted with cowboys on bucking broncos, paired with my husband’s red thermal undershirt (no guilt; he wouldn’t even wear such a thing in Alaska) and a vest leaking tufts of down, with a broken zipper and a rhinestone pin in the shape of pouting lips. Furry socks with embossed Minnie Mouse faces (the eyes having deteriorated in the wash) that clash with all of the above.

In her own voice: Sylvia Plath

Although I’ve read Plath’s poems many times, there is something powerful about hearing them read in the author’s own voice.  There are many recordings up on YouTube–some, unfortunately, that take more than a few liberties with her words and style.  When the recording of Plath reading her poems is set to images, I think Mishima does it best.  The first two recordings I include are theirs; the final one is from Drew Arriola, who has simply and elegantly juxtaposed Plath’s voice with a couple of well-chosen portraits.

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‘Daddy’ was written on 12 October 1962, only months before her death the following February.  It was published posthumously in Ariel in 1965.  ’Daddy’ can be read autobiographically in that it captures the complexity of her relationship with her father, who died when she was eight and who shadowed her life and romantic relationships.  But it can also be read more widely as a rejection of the kind of authority that gives the world a Hitler.

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‘Lady Lazarus’, also published in Ariel in 1965, is similar in tone and content to ‘Daddy’.  There are allusions to World War II, both the struggle against Nazi Germany and the war against Japan.  But I always read this poem as a personal one.  It catalogues her previous suicide attempts and anticipates the one in February 1963 that would claim her life.  It is chilling to listen to her refer to the phoenix, a mythological bird that rises from the ashes, particularly since her friend, the critic A. Alvarez, believed that she never intended to kill herself that cold February morning.  She had set up a situation in which she would be discovered just at the final moment.  Unfortunately, the gas leaked into the apartment below, making the tenant sleep heavily.  He did not hear the bell when the nanny arrived for her scheduled  ’interview’ with Plath.  The nanny waited patiently outside, thinking Plath must be out on an errand; in the meantime, Plath lay dying.  When the alarm was finally raised, it was too late.

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‘The Stones’, written in 1959 was part of a long meditative work, ‘Poem for a Birthday’, which celebrated Roethke as it was deeply influenced by him.   In fact, when the poem was submitted to Poetry, it was rejected for being derivative.  When it was submitted as part of The Colossus to Knopf, it was a condition of it’s acceptance that ‘Poem for a Birthday’ be cut.  Plath agreed, but transformed two of its sections for inclusion as individual poems: ‘Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond’ and ‘The Stones’.

‘The Stones’ is one of Plath’s many poems that relies on the idea of the double, the false self and the true self gripped in battle.  Plath lived this at every stage: the agreeable daughter, the good girl, the brilliant student battling the dark and damaged rebel; the sunny, pony-tailed American in postwar England at odds with the sexually independent woman coming of age; the cheerfully energetic housewife alternating with the fiercely feeling depressive, full of angst and violence.  ’The Stones’ was written before the Ariel poems, but it encapsulates their themes and rhythms.

Calling it “unlike anything that had gone before in her work”, her husband Ted Hughes said:

In its double focus, ‘The Stones’, is both a ‘birth’ and a ‘rebirth’. It is the birth of her real poetic voice, but it is the rebirth of herself. That poem encapsulates, with literal details, her ‘death’, her treatment, and her slow, buried recovery. And this is where we can see the pecularity of her imagination at work, where we can see how the substance of her poetry and the very substance of her survival are the same.

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Illness, slow time, and the lost art of letter writing

From those nagging suspicions that surface as a call to action through uncomfortable scans and biopsies, the wait for results, the unfailing shock of diagnosis and, finally, treatment that invades and exhausts, there’s nothing like a life-threatening illness to bring perspective to one’s life.

My habits changed in 2011.  Right from the beginning, still reeling, I took stock, figured out which aspects of my life I have control of and which I don’t.  Where I have control, I take it; otherwise, I let it go.  I now connect more often with loved ones, and I connect better, speaking from the heart about things that count.  My husband and I argue less—the little things just don’t matter—and we embrace more, glad at every sunrise.  Before treatment and since I regained my strength, I’ve exercised with vigor, delighting in physical exertion and all it means: I’m here, now, alive.

The world looks and sounds different.  That’s because I’ve slowed down.  I take the time to look around, to listen.  The shift of light in swaying branches, distant birdsong, the squeals of neighborhood children, the elderly couple walking hand-in-hand—life is all around.

One day, early on in my ordeal, when I went to collect the mail, I was delighted to find among the bills and junk an envelope with my name scrawled in blue ink.  A friend had taken the time to send a card full of love and good wishes in an elaborate handwritten message.  Not only that, but she made the card herself using the cover of an old Silhouette Romance paperback.  Inside, she had glued a short passage from the book, a conversation between lovers about convention and risk taking, hilarious, terribly written prose that, out of the context of the novel, was just the message I needed at that moment.  I was so touched.  Over the next long weeks, a few other such letters arrived and became lifelines for me.

I began to yearn for the time not so long ago when letter writing was commonplace.  There have been times in my life when I wrote letters daily.  This was in the late 1980s when I lived and worked in Thailand.  Without the distractions of the Internet or TV or a telephone or any kind of nightlife, I managed to do quite a bit of writing during those years.  I sent out dozens of letters every week, hoping for, but not necessarily expecting, a reply.  I didn’t need an answer to feel a real connection with the people I loved.  It was enough to give them something of myself in a dashed off postcard or a crammed aerogramme or lengthy descriptions of my daily life on several pages of onion skin paper.

During the awful wars of the 20^th century, vast machinery was created to get letters to and from soldiers.  Imagine the heightened emotion, the strange events, the care, the longing, the hope each of these letters held.  Imagine going to the letterbox, finding in the stack of correspondence the unique handwriting of the man you love.  Or what it meant to the soldier to hear his name called at mail time:  A letter from his fiancé had finally arrived!  Throughout the prodigious 19^th century, letter writing was the most common form of communication.  In fact, by the end of the century, there were between six and twelve mail deliveries per day in London, permitting correspondents to exchange multiple letters within a 24-hour period (Murray’s Handbook to London As It Is).

Without ever having had any formal instruction, my children use a variety of keypads with aplomb—to text, to send instant messages, to dash off emails.  Even in school, when my youngest was assigned an overseas pen pal, she wrote her letter in Word and printed it out.  To me, something valuable has been lost to us.  Our words might be tidier and more readable, but what about our hearts?

There’s something wonderful about knowing that the page you hold in your hands was only a short while before sitting on the desk of a friend, bent over, brushed by the sweep of her hair.  Not only does the letter bear her handwritten words, her crossed out mistakes, the afterthought that climbs sideways up the page, but also her fingerprints, her perfume, maybe a tear, her breath.

A letter is a gift of self.  And of time.  Something we all need more of.

Review: ‘What the Family Needed’ by Steven Amsterdam

fresh, dreamlike, magical

Every now and then, a novel arrives that conveys not only wisdom and understanding but also offers a dose of magic.  Part fable, part dreamscape, part family drama, What the Family Needed can be read in different ways.  Some of the delight is that nothing is lost in choosing one way over another; in fact, each reading contains all other possible readings.  I’m being mysterious, I know; but I’m afraid to reveal too much and steal even an ounce of joy this strange and charming book provides.

On the most superficial level, What the Family Needed is the story of a family over a lifetime.  At the centre is the oddball Alek, who exerts an influence over the others even when he isn’t present.  Adorable as a child, Alek is transformed into the complicated teenage rebel and, later, the adult misfit, while the family watches with concern and growing ambivalence.  All is not what it seems, however.  Amsterdam offers a unique explanation for how the whole of a family resides within each of its members.  And while it’s true that difference contains misunderstanding, as well as good will, and all sorts of consequences, each of us possesses special powers that arrive when we need them.

What the Family Needed is the second novel for Amsterdam, a worthy follow up to his debut Things We Didn’t See Coming, which won The Age Book of the Year for 2009.  It’s a remarkable story, full of imagination and fun.  Amsterdam reaches for the delicate web that connects us to each other and suggests a subtle new way of reading our lives.

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What the Family Needed         

Steven Amsterdam

Sleepers

November 2011

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Review first published in The Courier-Mail in December 2011.

Lost in a blue cupboard

Luck of the draw

Last week, my review of Sharell Cook’s Henna for the Broken-Hearted ran in The Courier-Mail and I reposted it here, mentioning that it may be the worst review I’ve ever written.  I’ve thought about it all week and felt it deserved further explanation. I’ve also thought quite a bit about the contemporary memoir and how the everyday world functions in it.

I’m not back-pedaling, now, when I say that it was a bit of bad luck for Cook that her book was sent to me when it was.  I stand by my review.  However, I also feel I must acknowledge the obvious: the reviewer’s background, preferences, attitudes, and opinions—even current circumstances—are built into the process of reviewing.

I respect writers and writing and the dedication it takes to produce a book—even a bad one.  When I’m sent a book for review, I remind myself that someone has spent hours crafting it and that, even if it’s not a genre I care for or a style I admire, the book must still be considered on its own merits.  If I’d had more space in my review of Henna for the Broken-Hearted, I might have been more nuanced; however, nothing changes my opinion that this particular memoir should not have been published.

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The contemporary memoir

I enjoy the genre in spite of the current flood.  It’s interesting to read about of the lives of others.  I’ve reviewed my fair share too: Joyce Carol Oates’ touching evocation of grief and loss in A Widow’s Story; Alice Pung’s bright light on the immigrant experience in Unpolished Gem; Kai Bird’s recollections of a childhood in the Middle East in Crossing Mandelbaum’s Gate.  Having liked The Year of Magical Thinking, I’m looking forward to reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.  Then, there’s Perfection by Julie Metz and Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen and, of course, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which are all similar to Henna for the Broken-Hearted in subject matter and approach.

While I was thinking about all of this, it struck me that there are two kinds of memoir.  The first type offers a window onto remarkable events—growing up in the 1950s and 60s as the son of a US ambassador in the Middle East, for example, or being kidnapped (and freed) by Somali soldiers. The context for these stories makes the writing easier. The writer can let the facts speak for themselves.  The second type of memoir is just the opposite.  Instead of the remarkable, this kind of memoir deals precisely with the unremarkable, the everyday lives of ordinary people, something any of us might experience.  It therefore requires something ‘special’ in the telling.

All of us grow up and each of our lives unfolds uniquely.  And yet we all have many things in common.  Most of us will know what it means to have a broken heart. One day, each of us will experience devastating grief at the loss of a loved one. The question becomes: Why should we be more interested in one of these ordinary stories than in any of the other millions just like it?

We care about Oates’ memoir of sudden widowhood because she’s an incredible stylist.  Didion’s book on the same subject offers profound insights into marriage, parenthood, grief and loss.  Pung and Janzen treat the collision between how they were raised and the grown-up world they’ve chosen with humour, tenderness, and a deep appreciation for their origins.

When I read Henna for the Broken-Hearted, I was looking for that ‘special’ ingredient.  Instead, the memoir reads like a chronological recitation, and it feels patched together.  When I learned that Cook authors a blog about her life in India, things began to make sense.  The book had just the feel of blog posts only rearranged into a timeline.  While I read it, I kept wondering why I should care for this particular romance, if there was anything about the events she recounted that shed light on the human experience.

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Being lost

It was partly Cook’s misfortune that I’d just finished re-reading a very different kind of memoir, The War by Marguerite Duras, when I was sent her book for review.  Henna for the Broken-Hearted recounts Cook’s recent courtship and plods heavily through the terrain of the everyday.  In contrast, The War covers the weeks Duras awaited the return of her husband from Belsen immediately after the camp was liberated in 1945.  The memoir was published in 1986, more than forty years after the events, when Duras and the rest of us had the benefit of knowing what really happened in German concentration camps.  At the time she wrote it, of course, news was sporadic, uncertain, beset by rumours and misinformation.  Duras preserves this uncertainty, choosing not to provide commentary or offer insight gained over the intervening years.  The War is a raw document of history, a powerful testament to the experience of so many others who similarly awaited news of loved ones displaced through war.  And, although it’s written as a diary, filled with “various comings and goings”, the everyday melts away, transformed into the universal.

It begins like this:

I found this diary in a couple of exercise books in the blue cupboards at Neauphle-le-Château.

I have no recollection of having written it.

I know I did.  I know it was I who wrote it.  I recognize my own handwriting and the details of the story.  I can see the place, the Gare d’Orsay, and the various comings and goings.  But I can’t see myself writing the diary.  When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house?  I can’t remember.

One thing is certain: it is inconceivable to me that I could have written it while I was actually awaiting Robert L.’s return.

How could I have written this thing I still can’t put a name to, and that appalls me when I reread it?  And how could I have left it lying for years in a house in the country that’s regularly flooded in winter?

The first time I thought about it was when the magazine Sorcières asked me for a text I’d written when I was young.

The War is one of the most important things in my life.  It can’t be called “writing”.  I found myself looking at pages regularly filled with small, calm, extraordinarily even handwriting.  I found myself confronted with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling that I couldn’t bring myself to tamper with, and beside which literature was something of which I felt ashamed.

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It’s true that the book may have had less force if it had been published in the late 1940s when the world was tired of war stories. Duras had already published two not very good books by the war’s end (Les Impudents, 1943, and La Vie Tranquille, 1944), but she was known more for her activities in the Resistance than for her writing.  Had the memoir been published before Duras attained such a huge presence in literary and intellectual spheres, it might have made barely a ripple—who knows?

Then, there is something devastating about the fact that the diary remained unremembered for so long.  Remarkable that it was hidden in a couple of exercise books, stashed away in the blue cupboards in a house that regularly flooded.  The exercise books might have been washed away, destroyed, tossed out, turned to dust, burned in a fire, or forever forgotten about.  The fact that none of these things happened is astonishing enough, but that the story is so wrenching and immediate, so important, on top of being so very nearly lost, strains our nerves.  What else has been lost?  What other treasures have been forgotten, carelessly destroyed?

The fact that The War was discovered in time and finally published is a gift.

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The problem with blogging

In the 1940s, it was exercise books.  Today, it’s blogs.

With the same ease as purchasing a notebook, we can sign up with WordPress, pick out a design template, and expound two cents’ worth on any subject.  The difference between the old exercise books and today’s medium of choice is that it’s all so public and so right now.  This is a big problem.  Cook’s story might have been more interesting if it had been lost for a number of years.  Perhaps certain events will occur to make her romance representative or poignant or of historical worth.

If everyone has a voice and feels the need to broadcast it, what we end up with is a lot of noise.  And if all we’re writing about is our ambivalence toward parenthood, our annoyance with traffic jams and nosy neighbours, what we ate for breakfast, and how to get that stain out of our best shirt, we’re not commenting on anything really, we’re only perpetuating our own drudgery for others.

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A challenge 

It isn’t every day that one waits for a loved one to return from a concentration camp.  Duras’ wait was filled with days and the days with commonplace events—eating and not eating, sleeping and not sleeping, waiting by the phone.  The War connects us to a heightened experience of the everyday and to a deeper sense of our common humanity—just what a potent and worthy memoir should do.  My fear is that with so much self-profiling going on, with all that noise, the remarkable is being swept away on the riptide of the ordinary.  Sadly, we will be less for it.

I challenge everyone who writes to think carefully about what they put out there.  Could your story withstand being lost for four decades?  Would it be made better?

Review: Henna for the Broken-Hearted by Sharell Cook

In the late 1980s, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Southeast Asia.  When I learned that Sharell Cook left her comfortable life in Melbourne to volunteer at a women’s centre in India, I anticipated revisiting my own experiences of cultural confusion and personal transformation.  In Henna for the Broken-Hearted, there’s not much at all about Cook’s brief time as a volunteer.  Fleeing her crumbling marriage and tired of the Melbourne party scene, Cook goes to India to find ‘meaning’.  Unfortunately, most of this leaden memoir is about the party life she finds when she gets there and, of course, the man she meets, whom she will later marry.

Overusing adjectives and platitudes, Cook often refers to ‘the universe’.  She also complains.  A lot.  And her list of irritations is long: she can’t stand squat toilets, leering men, nosy neighbors, dirt, double standards, corruption, and irregular Internet connections.

Once I recognised Henna for the Broken-Hearted is a typical story of a thirty-something woman growing up, I looked for other reasons to like it.  Did she lose herself in exquisite descriptions of the Indian landscape?  Not really.  Did she compose humorous portraits of the people she encountered?  Again no.  Was she curious about the lives of others?  If she was, her curiosity rarely poked through.

Cook claims the decision to make her life in India was transformative.  On one level, it was.  She’s learned another language, unfamiliar customs, even patience.  But on the deeper level of seeing the world with new eyes, I’m not so sure.

Perhaps if she had written her experiences in a journal and left it to season over time, she might have produced something wise and worth reading.

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Henna for the Broken-Hearted  

Sharell Cook  

MacMillan  

Memoir  

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Call for Submissions: Creative Nonfiction Magazine’s ‘Australia’ issue

. Creative Nonfiction Magazine in association with Tashmadada present The Down Under Essay Contest The U.S. quarterly magazine, Creative Nonfiction in association with Tashmadada, seeks new essays for a special “Australia” issue: “We’re looking for a variety of perspectives – from locals, expats, tourists, or anyone else – and will consider essays of all forms and focuses as long as Australia’s landscape, people, and/or culture are prominently featured; the stories are true; and submissions are previously unpublished. Essays must be vivid and dramatic. Writing should combine a strong and compelling narrative with a significant element of research or information, and reach for some universal or deeper meaning. We’re looking for a well-written prose, rich with detail and a distinctive voice.” Essays must be 4,000 words maximum and submitted by January 31st, 2012.  Lee Gutkind (USA) and Leah Kaminsky (AUS) will serve as contest judges.  All writers and submissions, regardless of country of origin, will be considered for the Best Essay prize.  However, submissions from current citizens or permanent residents of the Commonwealth of Australia will be considered for a second category: Best Essay by an Australian Writer.  Naturally, the same writer/essay may not win both prizes. The prizes, which have been provided by The Writers Conversation, are generous: $6500 for Best Essay $2500 for Best Essay by an Australian Writer Although there will be only two contest winners, all submissions will be considered by the judges for inclusion in Creative Nonfiction #46: Australia, which will be launched at the 2012 Melbourne Writers’ Festival. For more detailed submission guidelines, see the Creative Nonfiction Magazine website. .

Review: The Monsoon Bride by Michelle Aung Thin

Winsome, as lovely as her name implies, is newly married to Desmond, an ambitious civil servant.  Both are half-castes and, in the Burma of the 1930s, their position is awkward, neither accepted by the British ruling class nor by the oppressed and simmering Burmese. Raised in a convent and chosen by Desmond in order to assist his career, Winsome appears to be the perfect bride.  Then, life in Rangoon, with its mix of cultures, strange sights, and opportunities, transforms her from a malleable convent girl into a sensual woman.  Though he disapproves, Desmond tolerates Winsome’s job in the studio of a wealthy Burmese photographer.  The mysterious Daw Sein is a formidable woman resentful of the English and supportive of the rising native rebellion. However, when Winsome falls for Desmond’s boss, an English doctor who prides himself on his open-minded views, Desmond finds himself powerless in an intolerable situation.

Michelle Aung Thin sets up The Monsoon Bride with skill and insight.   The relationship between Winsome and the Englishman unfolds as expected: for Winsome, it’s true love; for Jonathan, just too complicated.  Desmond merely waits for the end.  However, the fate of these characters distracts from the more interesting issue: How will the rebellion unfold?  And when?  Rather than being helplessly entangled in a racially fuelled political struggle, Winsome and her lover exist alongside it.  The heat, the incessant rain, the exotic setting evoked so beautifully all fall away to reveal nothing but a humdrum love triangle.

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The Monsoon Bride     

Michelle Aung Thin    

Text Publishing    

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Review first published in The Courier-Mail in September 2011. 

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In Search of Cancer in Literature

The word cancer comes from the Greek word karkinos meaning “crab”.  It was coined by Hippocrates, who thought tumours resembled these creatures.  Cancers were known of in ancient times, but little could be done to arrest the disease.  Early medical techniques were drastic and, without anaesthesia, tortuous.  In more recent literature, stories about cancer tend to focus on psychological and sociological dimensions of the disease.  It serves as a metaphor for the death that awaits us all.

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Ancient Egyptian texts, Papyrus Louvre E32847, recto 20-verso 16 (1500BCE)

The world’s oldest documented cases of cancer are recorded on these papyrus texts, which elaborate eight cases of tumours occurring on the breast.  According to the inscriptions, there was no curative treatment for the disease, only palliative treatment.  Surface tumours were surgically removed in a  manner similar to today.  Deeper tumours required cauterisation, an attempt to destroy tissue with a hot instrument known ‘the fire drill’.

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Hippocrates, Hippocratic Corpus (460-377BCE)

Hippocrates gives an account of a woman from Abdera who had a carcinoma of the breast with a bloody discharge from her nipple.  When he treated this discharge, stopping the bleeding, she died.  He also noted that when menstrual bleeding ceased, breast cancer became more prevalent.  He identified stages of cancer, noting that, as the disease progresses, the patient develops a bitter taste, refuses food, develops a shooting pain from breast to neck, complains of thirst and becomes emaciated.  From this point, death was certain.

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The Legend of Saint Agatha (3rd Century BCE)

Born into an illustrious family, Agatha found faith early in life.  Possessing both wealth and beauty, she caught the attention of Quintianus, a local dignitary.  Bent on gratifying his lust and avarice, exploited the emperor’s edict against the Christians and had her kidnapped. Rather than submit, she prayed for salvation.  This infuriated Quintianus, who had her tortured in increasingly gruesome ways, even cutting off her breasts.  Her wounds miraculously healed, a fact Quintianus ignored.  Finally, she asked God to receive her and gave up her ghost.  Because of her mutilation, she is known as the patron saint of breast cancer.

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Fanny Burney, A Mastectomy: Letter to Esther Burney (1812)

…When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast – cutting through veins – arteries – flesh – nerves – I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony. When the wound was made, & the instrument was withdrawn, the pain seemed undiminished, for the air that suddenly rushed into those delicate parts felt like a mass of minute but sharp & forked poniards, that were tearing the edges of the wound – but when again I felt the instrument – describing a curve – cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator, who was forced to change from the right to the left – then, indeed, I thought I must have expired.

I attempted no more to open my Eyes, – they felt as if hermetically shut, & so firmly closed, that the Eyelids seemed indented into the Cheeks. The instrument this second time withdrawn, I concluded the operation over – Oh no! presently the terrible cutting was renewed – & worse than ever, to separate the bottom, the foundation of this dreadful gland from the parts to which it adhered – Again all description would be baffled – yet again all was not over, – Dr Larry rested but his own hand, & – Oh Heaven! – I then felt the Knife tackling against the breast bone – scraping it! – This performed, while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture, I heard the Voice of Mr Larry, – (all others guarded a dead silence) in a tone nearly tragic, desire everyone present to pronounce if anything more remained to be done; The general voice was Yes, – but the finger of Mr Dubois – which I literally felt elevated over the wound, though I saw nothing, & though he touched nothing, so indescribably sensitive was the spot – pointed to some further requisition – & again began the scraping! – and, after this, Dr Moreau thought he discerned a peccant attom – and still, & still, M. Dubois demanded attom after atom…

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 The Death of Jane Austen (18 July 1817)

Jane Austen’s death at the relatively young age of 41, has been the subject of much speculation.  Critics and historians have suggested a number of possibilities, from a recurrence of childhood typhus to bovine tuberculosis to Addison’s Disease.  More recently, lymphoma has been put forward as a possible culprit.  In Jane Austen (2001), Carol Shields speculates that the author died of breast cancer.  It’s worth noting that Shields died two years after publishing the Austen biography.  Cause of death? Breast cancer.

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Edith Wharton, “Diagnosis” (1930)

This short story focuses on the reverberations of illness and impending death–specifically, the way a diagnosis can lead to certain behaviours that would otherwise not be undertaken. As he is leaving his doctor after being pronounced healthy, Paul Dorrance spies a piece of paper with the word “cancer” written on it.  Believing his doctor has deceived him, he leaves in a cloud of gloom and, in that mood, is prompted to propose to Eleanor, his long time mistress.  He had earlier that day determined to break off with Eleanor, but now feels she is just the one to care for him through illness until death.  However, Paul survives in surprising good health.  It’s Eleanor who becomes ill, dying of a heart attack many years later.  Paul then learns she had paid a visit to the doctor on the fateful day of Paul’s cancer “diagnosis” tricking him as he sought to trick her.

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Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (1965)

Although I was not with Maman when she died, and although I had been with three people when they were actually dying, it was when I was at her bedside that I saw Death, the Death of the dance of death, with its bantering grin, the Death of fireside tales that knocks on the door, a scythe in its hand, the Death that comes from elsewhere, strange and inhuman: it had the very face of Maman when she showed her gums in a wide smile of unknowingness.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968)

Solzhenitsys examines with clinical precision the nature of the physical disease and the process whereby the patient, like the prisoner–”stripped of his outer bark and ready to be planed”–is revealed to himself and sometimes transformed by the confrontation with death.

Cancer Ward is based on his own experiences when he was cast up in Tashkent, sick with cancer, after having spent  eight years in prisons and camps.  Still in exile, he entered a hospital where his cancer, never clearly diagnosed as malignant, was “cured”.

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Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978) and

David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008)

Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, originally published as three long essays in The New York Review of Books, while she was being treated for breast cancer in the early 1970s.  In the treatise, she writes about the kingdom of the ill and challenges the blame-the-victim mentality that surrounds illness.  Without mentioning her own illness, she defies the thinking that cancer is caused by the patient’s supposed ‘cancer personality’.  According to proponents of this theory, patients bring cancer upon themselves by having a resigned, repressed, inhibited personality.  In some way or another, the patient derives emotional benefits from illness, and the patient can overcome cancer by consciously choosing to give up these benefits.

Sontag died in New York City on 28 December 2004, aged 71, from acute myelogenous leukaemia, a cancer of the blood.  Her final illness has been chronicled by her son, David Rieff, in Swimming in a Sea of Death.  He reports that the most difficult aspect of her final decline was the terrifying democracy of illness and shows that, in the end, Sontag couldn’t live her illness without metaphor: she needed the idea of a fight even after the fight was lost.

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Helen Garner, The Spare Room (2008)

A woman named Helen prepares her spare room for her fried Nicola who has stage-four cancer.  Nicola, who refuses to believe she is dying, is coming to Helen’s city in order to undertake an alternative therapy that Helen believes is pure quackery.  This novel, which inhabits a land between fiction and non-fiction, shows two powerfully different views of illness.  The clear, calm perspective of the healthy is a luxury dreamed of by the dying. Helen remains furious, judgmental, powerless; Nicola, also ultimately powerless, clings to the shreds of hope, refusing to submit to the inevitable.

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Review: History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

Piet Barol, the hero of History of a Pleasure Seeker, is handsome, accomplished, charming, and clever.  The only problem is that he’s poor.

Piet’s late mother was a talented musician who made an unfortunate match.  Through her, he was exposed to high arts, fine taste, and Parisian pleasures, without the means to enjoy them.  He manages to secure a position as a tutor with the grandest family in Amsterdam and ingratiates himself with family members and household staff alike.  In 1907, a tutor was not a servant but also not the equal of his employers; Piet exploits this ambiguity.

There are a series of predictable dalliances and many scenes in which Piet’s attractiveness and cleverness are underscored.  But Richard Mason knows when to pull back too: Piet is no cardboard hero, rather a complicated man with some insight into his flaws and a capacity for remorse.  It’s just that he’s a risk-taker who can’t resist temptation.

History of a Pleasure Seeker is a hybrid novel—part historical fiction, part romance, part homage to the Gilded Age. Mason has done some fine research, cleverly weaving in major events and historical figures, as well as making knowledgeable references to the music, art, customs and prejudices of the belle epoque.  Piet’s story doesn’t end here; Mason has other volumes in the works. I’m surprised by how much I look forward to reading what comes next.

This first novel actually resembles the hero: shallow, self-indulgent, diverting, not to be taken seriously, but oh such fun.

History of a Pleasure Seeker   

Richard Mason   

Hachette   

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