Why I Have Not Written About My Breast Cancer

I’m a big fan of Nora Ephron’s truism, “Everything is copy.” I’ve written about nearly every aspect of my life, a lot of it for public consumption. My first published essay was in a student supplement of the Boston Globe back in 1985, about the death of a family friend with HIV. I wrote about a classmates’ license plate, “Me+Law=$” for my law school newspaper, Mere Dictum. I have written about my children, my pets, and my secret alcoholic drinking rituals. Once I even wrote about a dream I had about sewing polar fleece hats for my frostbitten chickens.

I am a writer. I write about what happens to me. That’s what writers do.

So when I was diagnosed with invasive lobular breast cancer back in October (via phone call on October 7, 2:37 PM in the Gardener’s Supply parking lot off VT Route 7 while Taylor Swift’s “Clean” was playing in the car) my second thought after, “shit, I have cancer,” was, “well, here’s something else I can write about.”

And yet, haven’t. Not publicly, at least.

It’s not for lack of words. I reported on everything dutifully in my ever-present notebooks lest I forget the smallest detail. Early on, I reported from the ultrasound waiting room (I’d never seen someone translate for a deaf-blind person in real life before and the way their hands slid and danced together, one telling, the other feeling, made my brain tingle) and later, from my hospital bed (the anti-blood clot compression boots inflated gradually from my toes to my thighs and I repeatedly woke up believing my cat was slinking up my legs).

I have pages on what it felt like when my physician husband removed four, foot-long french-drain suction tubes out of my body (nightmarish, trans-abdominal tapeworm extraction), the odd appearance of my reconstructed breasts with their round plateau of grafted abdominal skin where my nipples used to be (Uluru, the massive red sacred rock in Australia) and the surprising, electric twang of nerves re-connecting around my incisions (neglect to switch off the fuse before replacing an outlet).

Not having time to write wasn’t my problem, either.

I am still, months out from surgery, not allowed to lift anything heavier than my under-proofed and overly dense sourdough loaves. Since falling on ice isn’t a great idea either, here I sit at my desk, doing the light lift of administrative work. If you received a marketing letter from me with a brochure about my current speaking topics, you were a part of what far too many people have referred to as my “healing journey.”

My problem is that not all stories, no matter how traumatic or joyful, make for compelling copy. Yes, I’ve watched Shirley MacLaine scream at the nurses to give her daughter the shot more times than I can count and of course Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things is breathtaking. Yes, Dying for Sex was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen on television.

What makes those works captivating, though, isn’t the cancer. Those stories are glorious because they feel true and we know it in our guts. The desperation of helplessness when your child is in pain. A friendship reaching its coda while the laughter resonates beyond. Desperately wanting something you’ve never been allowed to have.

The shows I abandon and the books I throw across the room half-read have the whiff of writer as hostage to a story, a work that reeks of “should” rather than “want,” where the words are ornamentation rather than substrate and describe a thing that happened to someone rather than a thing that happened in someone.

What I want to write right now is the story of a high school boy trying to figure out who he is while the people in his life tell him what he ought to be.

Cancer happened to me but what I want to write most right now is the story happening in me, with words that feel glorious, desperate, and true.