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Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics
By Miriam Engelberg
Harper
126 pp $14.95

Cancer Vixen: A True Story
By Marisa Acocella Marchetto
Alfred A. Knopf
212 pp $22

This is how cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto saw her diagnosis of breast cancer: She's sucked off the earth, designer heels and all, into a black hole where it's dark and cold and she wishes she could just go back to her home planet, where she normally obsesses about her self-esteem, her weight, and her hair.

Miriam Engelberg's response to her diagnosis was more cerebral. Everyone around her was so certain that her breast biopsy would come back negative that her first thought was "Ha! Now they'll take me seriously."

Both of these women -- very different from each other -- chose to tell their breast cancer stories through comics that form a narrative memoir. Reading about the nightmare that is cancer is usually one of the least amusing ways to spend an afternoon. But a cancer memoir illustrated like the Sunday funnies is somehow more accessible -- perhaps even more human.

Neither book flinches at showing what a slice of hell it is to be diagnosed and treated for cancer, but both are so honest and darkly funny that you can't help but be drawn into them. Engelberg, for example, writes of trying to restrain her tell-all tendencies, imagining people admiring her from afar: "Oh wow! There's that woman who never talks. She's so mysterious and alluring!" In the next frame, which shows her bumping into an acquaintance in the street, she confesses she was not successful: "Hi, how are you?" "I have breast cancer! (Sob!)"

I am in treatment for breast cancer myself, and I found that both books helped reveal what to expect, and that each mirrored many of my coping mechanisms (total panic, denial, twisted humor, surreal dissociation, more panic). Each book also had me laughing out loud in places and nodding in agreement. If every woman's breast cancer experience is singular, clearly there are parts of the experience we all share.

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person is in a stack of books and magazines at the hospital infusion center where I received chemo. I've watched patients pick it up, flip through it, and smile. Tragically, while she was so successful in bringing humor to something so dreadful, Engelberg didn't succeed in fighting off cancer herself. Three years after her initial diagnosis and treatment, doctors discovered that the cancer had metastasized to her bones and brain. She died in October 2006 at the age of 48.

In the beginning, Engelberg hadn't planned to write a book. She began drawing the cartoons that would become her memoir when, at age 43, she was waiting for her biopsy results and looking for a way to maintain her sanity. A San Franciscan, a wife, and the mother of a young son, she used the simple line drawings and their sometimes hilarious captions and dialogue as a way to exorcise her feelings during diagnosis and treatment.

"When the radiologist called with the bad news, I realized how foolish I'd been not to take the day off," she writes in a panel that shows her on the phone at work while tears roll down her face. "Now I needed to figure out the etiquette of cancer announcements in the workplace," she writes. In a box with fancy script she pens: "Miriam Engelberg cordially invites you to join her in reacting to her new CANCER diagnosis. Please -- No Gifts."

A performer, a part-time computer trainer, and a cartoonist for a nonprofit organization, Engelberg goes on to chronicle chemo, radiation, coworkers' and friends' helpful and not-so-helpful advice -- and the fact that she couldn't seem to reach the higher plane where she thought a person with a life-threatening illness belonged. Spiritual practice didn't work; neither did visualization. She felt crummy, and all she really wanted to do was watch "Celebrity Poker" on TV.

She also got hooked on TV crossword puzzles. In one panel, she draws herself in bed next to her husband, eyes wide open. "Sometimes I wondered whether doing crosswords was the best way for me to spend time now that I had cancer," she writes. "What if I die soon? Perhaps I should stop escaping and face my life and death head on?" "Nah!" she says. "I'll face death some other time when I'm not going through this scary cancer thing."

Before writing Cancer Vixen, Marchetto went on a spiritual quest herself, both consulting a Kaballist rabbi and turning to her Catholic origins. She too undergoes an emotional and spiritual crisis, but that doesn't stop her from telling us the hot designer of every pair of shoes she wears to her appointments.

A Manhattanite who regularly sells her cartoons to Glamour and the New Yorker, and a self-described fashionista, Marchetto gets her diagnosis just before she is to marry a fast-lane restaurateur who mingles with gorgeous celebrities every night. Battling cancer at 43, she's worried about how she'll compete, but love does conquer all.

The book is a bit too "look-at-how-chic-my-world-is" for my taste, and speaking for the thousands of women who had no choice, I got apoplectic when Marchetto told her doctor she'd kill herself if she had to lose her hair. But her sense of humor and self-effacement help keep her story in check. Cancer Vixen also provides an inside look at precisely what cancer treatment is like. Marchetto went through the process with a tape recorder in hand, and she's so meticulous, she draws the actual size of every needle and tells us exactly how many needle sticks she got throughout treatment. In her case, the treatment was lumpectomy, "chemo lite" (little hair loss), and radiation.

Marchetto is wonderfully imaginative and a fine cartoonist. I love how she draws her cancer cells -- as bilious green, scowling blobs with their tongues sticking out. Cancer Vixen is visually striking, filled with rich, poppy colors on lustrous paper stock. It's a joy to look at and a feisty work as well. The heart and soul of the book is her determination to kick cancer in the gut. That's what everyone with this disease is hoping for.

-- Elaine Herscher is Senior Managing Editor at Consumer Health Interactive and coauthor of Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Epidemic of Obesity (Perseus paperback, 2006).

First published March 12, 2007
Last updated July 28, 2008
Copyright © 2007 Consumer Health Interactive

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