I remember well the terrible stillness in which I sat for minutes, the book closed in front of me, stunned by Roth’s highly specific language, the best depiction of a cancer patient I have ever read, before getting up and crossing First Avenue to go to clinic.
I had just moved to New York to begin a hospital fellowship when I read the part where Drenka, Mickey Sabbath’s lover, lies in the final stages of ovarian cancer. Although you could say the themes of Roth’s book – bodily cravings, pushed to their limit – are part of the same spectrum, the other end of it maybe. One of the books where the illness is confined to a devastating side role. I calmed down when I found out that Skloot’s book was biographical and, I like to think, a non-fictional counterpart to my own. She died of an aggressive cervical cancer in the 1950s, which was then maintained after her death as an immortalised cell line. Lacks is an important woman in cancer history and features in my book, albeit figuratively. I was halfway through my novel when I discovered – to my horror – that this book was coming out. The Immortal Tale of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot This is not because I didn’t like it, but because I haven’t read it. Some of them I read as an oncologist, some as an interested bystander, and some with the pathos and pain of that nephew, grandson, friend and son.īy the way, I’ve left out the most prominent recent book, The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
These are some of the books I’ve read where cancer has figured, either as the dominating theme or in a walk-on role that you won’t forget. But before there is a writer there’s a reader.
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