Better Than Ever: Breast Hallucinations at the New Cancer Doctor's Office
Digressions on Mortality and Resistance
I’ve lived with loved ones with cancer for decades. Beginning with my young stepmother in the sixties. My mother, and father, and my ex. I know many of you share the experience. —Cancer, AIDS, COVID, and always, always, cancer.
Cancer culture and “women’s healthcare” are a special room in hell, to be sure. I find that mortality, the midwifery of death, and the forcefield of the female body are in my constant thoughts.
No one has laid out the tender/brutal cancer-clusterfuck terrain as beautifully as writer Ariel Gore and her late wife, Deena Chafetz.
When Deena was alive and ill’in, she wrote a microbook, “Kittens, Blunts, & Metastatic Breast Cancer.” Ariel illustrated it. I think I gave out 50 copies.
Ariel’s writing, and Deena’s influence, have given me a reason to greet the sun and think clearly on many a caretaker-catastrophe day when it didn't seem plausible.
When Deena died in November of ’23, I talked to Ariel about her own almost-finished manuscript of living inside the cancer journal years— as Audre Lorde once described.
I asked her, “What can I do?”
Once upon a time in the 90s, Ariel edited my memoir. I would do anything to offer the same help back. Editing books with her, on either side of the pen, has been the high-water mark of my long publishing life
I hope you’ll enjoy a short excerpt from Ariel’s new book, below. It’s called Rehearsals for Dying.
—Susie
