Hello Cancer My Old Friend

Review of Ariel Gore's Rehearsals for Dying

Out today! Order your copy from Feminist Press or a local independent book store!

ATTENTION: Ariel Gore reads from Rehearsals For Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer this Friday March 14, 7PM at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. SEE YOU THERE!

I get a little intimidated when it’s time to review books, especially books my friends write. My imposter syndrome blooms. Overthinking collapses my agency. What if I say the wrong thing? I am aware this is ridiculous. I love books and I love my friends. I would be lost without them. I can get through anything with a good friend or a good book. So I sit down both excited and also slightly frozen, to write about my good friend’s good book.

I’ve been friends with Ariel for 24 years, since 2001. This is our third time through the Year of the Snake—we met in Metal, lived through Water, and now we enter Wood.

Ariel Gore is well established as a writer of experimental memoir. Her book The End Of Eve: A Memoir tells the story of Ariel’s place in her family as she tends her dying mother, who does not go gently, rather rages against her children, as her body suffers unto death from cancer. Like many of Ariel’s books it is a survival guide, often recommended to adult children shepherding difficult parents through end-of-life care. The End of Eve was released 11 years and one day ago, on March 10, 2014. At the end of the book we meet the Chef, a handsome butch woman who sweeps us off our feet in the way of the best romances, as both Ariel’s mother and her relationship die before us. One of the reasons I as a reader fell for the Chef, was because the end of Eve was so hard, and the Chef offered relief and a promise of sweet recovery.

Ariel Gore is, like me, a Cancer. Cancers are famously understood to be maternal, and home-centered, emotional and difficult. Less famously, Cancers hold memories, as the ocean of stories experienced by humanity. It can be confusing to be a wandering Cancer—like I am, or like Ariel is—when we are boxed into a sessile idea of home. When we think of Cancers as living out of a backpack we carry everywhere, or as people who make home wherever we go, confusion melts. I think we are considered difficult because when someone hurts our feelings, we cannot hide it, and also because we remember things. We hold the memories of our human experiences. Sometimes this can feel like a grudge to other people; to us, it’s a loose end. We need an end to the story. Many people are happy to forget, to let the past blur, to ‘move on’ perhaps before we are ready. Cancers remember, even when it hurts. We tell hard stories, with piercing detail. We remain through the end, after everyone is ready to turn the page.

Rehearsals For Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer is a Cancer’s book about cancer. It begins long after Ariel married the Chef and lived for a time in the sweet promise we glimpsed in Eve. The dedication reads:

Deena didn’t want to die in this book because she didn’t want to die, but there was no other way this story could end.

Not everyone can be a survivor—and none of us indefinitely.

What follows are over 140 micro-chapters, titled things like “The Autobiography of Deena E Chafetz” where Ariel says, “…it was obvious to me from the beginning—and to Deena—that I would write about our lives and her cancer. I would write Deena’s autobiography just as Gertrude Stein wrote Alice B. Toklas’s autobiography.”

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know truths that exist inside illness, inside marriage, inside the cancer industrial complex. The little chapters are fierce and funny, full of facts that will enrage and validate medical experience—especially the people with breast cancer who are not women in the way doctors want us to be women, or who are men. We follow the stories of Deena, a butch lesbian, and several other people who live and die with breast cancer—Liv, a stripper, Earl, a trans man, Sia, a Black woman, Miriam a Jewish poet—and learn from Ariel’s journalism facts you will never get from a pink waiting room brochure. Fact: While the national divorce rate is 11.6% in the general population, for seriously ill women divorce rates are 29%. Men are seven times as likely to leave partners after a cancer diagnosis. Fact: Black women have a 4% lower chance of getting breast cancer but a 40% higher likelihood of dying from cancer as compared to white women. Fact: 41,000 people a year die of breast cancer in the United States; 700,000 world wide.

We learn about how much money drug companies, doctors, hospitals, healthcare industries earn for every diagnosis; we hear care providers casually refer to whole countries as ‘emerging markets’ for cancer treatment; we meet doctors, so many doctors. Ariel and Deena make a game of nicknaming them based on brief, expensive visits: Dr. Ego, Dr. Cowboy, Dr. Vogue, Dr. Inappropriate.

We learn that cancer researchers adopted military vernacular in 1971 during the Cold War; from this we get cancer warrior, ‘fighting’ cancer, battling for health. This essentially creates an othering within the body: the self against the body, the self as host to a war. We learn that a 2003 study determined that war terminology applied to medical diagnoses leads to higher rates of depression and poorer quality of life.

We learn from Susan Sontag, Barbara Eherenreich, Gertrude Stein and many other writers, most notably the great author and thinker Audre Lorde, in her seminal work The Cancer Journals. Ariel weaves the care and anger of these women into her own life and marriage to create a spell of great power: a book about dying that is full of love, rage, humor, discomfort, bald greed, awkwardness, generosity, and above all the practical, genius response of a writing widow-to-be. When Ariel shares her ‘journal of unspeakable thoughts,’ she offers a way for all of us to manage our endings. It’s a how to, it’s a don’t-do-it-this-way, it’s backup for when you next go to the doctor and they dismiss your complaints as trivial.

The magnificent Audre Lorde

We don’t just get information from Ariel’s excellent skills as a journalist. Ghosts walk through the book as easily as they walk through our lives, and all the stories we never read about the medicalization of the body. Wisdom in Ariel’s books come from all places: omens, tarot cards, calls to Oregon witches for quick deathbed consultations. If you are in Ariel’s sphere, you inhabit a living lexicon from which she makes her great art. The combination of hard science, anecdotal experience, intuition and deep magic is powerful. I take an Epsom salt bath every night after I get home from the warehouse; after a decent soak, I wash off the day and the salt, which takes maybe five minutes. This book is so good that BOTH times I read it all the way through, I kept reading the book during the shower part. I refused to put it down, and just managed a one-handed wash, moving the book from hand to hand so I could get all my bits. And some of the water stains, of course, are tears.

I am so grateful to Deena, for so many things. For loving my friend so well. I still remember the way Deena transformed a bouquet of birthday flowers into the most chivalrous thing I have ever seen, a sweep and dramatic bow, on Ariel’s 50th birthday, in the middle of lockdown and the day after an incredibly painful spinal tap. I am grateful for her Awesome Potato Salad, which we can all make and eat in her honor, thanks to its place on page 21. But I am most grateful for the way she accepts Ariel as a writer—so much so that she agreed to become a central part of this book in all its pain, loss, and beauty.

Thank you, Ariel Gore, for giving us a book about cancer that makes space for all of us who have a complicated relationship to pink and to fitting in; for helping us find a path between truth and the degrading reality of the modern doctor’s waiting office. Thank you for creating a space for my post cancer self to feel completely at home, crying and dryly observing greed with gallows humor. Thank you for sharing your loving marriage and the secrets of terrible loss.

My brave and vulnerable introvert friend, you who reveal all and must stand up in front of people for a living. Crab life forever. I can’t wait to see you on Friday.

Paid subscribers: Here’s what I wrote in Good Night People of Earth in April, 2020 for the first anniversary of my double mastectomies surgery after my breast cancer diagnosis:

The lilacs are opening and smell divine. This one is very old, her perfume is exquisite. 

I grew up with lilacs. Spring in western New York is a fickle business and snow inevitably buries flowers in March and April. The lilacs arrive with the occasional warm round breeze that numbers winter’s days and lifts the heart. Snow does happen after they appear, but not as often and doesn’t stay. I love them. 

I also love British fantasy author Terry Pratchett’s ridiculous stories. In Night Watch the heroes wear a lilac sprig during an accidental uprising to identify themselves so as to avoid killing each other.