Everything you wanted to know about young adults and cancer. But were afraid to ask.

Books

Literary Lollygagging
Books by and for cancer patients.

Some serious, some silly, some inspiring. Side effects may include: laughing loudly in public for no apparent reason, calling people you care about to tell them you love them, constantly lending the book to others, an inexplicable sense of euphoria, whiter teeth in just 5 days and, of course, black tarry stool.

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"Enter Sandman"
by Stephanie Williams
Stephanie Williams wrote this novel during her battle with breast cancer. A high-powered journalist in New York City, novel-writing was always something she had been drawn to, but feared. When she was given a terminal diagnosis, she decided it was now or never. "Enter Sandman" is a powerful legacy to a life well-lived.Trisha Portman seems to have a magical life: good looks, a dream job at a hot Soho art gallery, a handsome lawyer boyfriend, devoted friends. But she’s still waiting for her big break. One day a mysterious painting arrives at the gallery—one that just might catapult her to the top. Instead, it takes her on a disturbing odyssey.Her search for the anonymous artist brings her back to her college days and to James Morales, who is contemptuous of her and the rest of the world. His artistic brilliance is exceeded only by the lengths he will go to make people dislike him— including, for some unfathomable reason, refusing to use his gift.Fate had thrown this pair together in college, and now their prickly relationship resumes in New York City. Yet everything changes once Trisha takes a step into James’s tormented life. Not only does she find an unlikely soul mate, but she soon becomes more like this man she once detested—when she suffers a life-changing misfortune of her own.
Stephanie Williams, in this unforgettable first novel, explores the tyranny of the superficial, the power of friendship—and the mystery of what people choose to leave behind.Available from McWitty Press www.mcwittypress.com Articles about the author are also available from the website.
Here and Now: Inspiring Stories of Cancer Survivors
by Elena Dorfman and Heidi Schultz Adams
Facing cancer is a life-changing event, one that prompts soul-searching and a reevaluation of all that one holds to be true. In the years following their own cancer treatments, authors Elena Dorfman and Heidi Schultz Adams were left wondering, What difference has cancer made in other people's lives? What does it mean to survive a life-threatening illness? In Here and Now, Dorfman and Adams offer photographic portraits and personal stories of 38 people-of all ages and from all walks of life-who have confronted cancer at some point in their lives. Their stories explore both the universal questions raised by a cancer diagnosis, and how their unique answers to those questions shaped each survivor into who they are today. Here and Now is a beautiful volume that will provide comfort and insight to everyone from the recently diagnosed to the 20-year survivor, eloquently demonstrating how seemingly insurmountable adversity can bring forth surprising courage and strength, both in us and those around us. "Here and Now will inspire the many people with a history of cancer. Heidi and Elena have captured crucial issues that affect the psychosocial, physical and emotional aspects of a cancer diagnosis, and more importantly, survival."
--Lance Armstrong, founder of the Lance Armstrong Foundation "Here and Now provides a rare glimpse into life after cancer. With raw intimacy, thirty-eight survivors tell their stories and how they made sense of their cancer experiences. These oral histories make you think. Elena Dorfman and Heidi Schultz Adams have made an important contribution." --Wendy S. Harpham, M.D., author of After Cancer: A Guide to Your New Life A portion of the proceeds from Here and Now will be donated to support Planet Cancer.
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"A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing"
by Reynolds Price
Okay, in general we're not big fans of the blow-by-blow cancer memoir. But this is Reynolds Price we're talking about here--award-winning novelist and professor at Duke University' with numerous poems' stories and plays to his credit (not to mention song lyrics for James Taylor). In 1984, he found a 10-inch-long tumor in his spinal cord--"the eel," as he called it. Three surgeries and radiation therapy arrested the growth, but left him unable to walk and in enormous pain. Most of the book is about his medical journey; itself a testament to human perseverance. But the last chapter alone is worth the price of the whole book: his brutally frank views on chronic illness as a state of being and his unflinching (and frequently amusing, if you've ever been on the patient's side of things) examination of the change in how people interacted with him. Finally, he offers suggestions for others on "how to absorb the staggering but not-quite-lethal blow of a fist that ends your former life and offers you nothing by way of a new life that you can begin to think of wanting, though you clearly have to go on feeding your gimped-up body and roofing the space above your bed." His suggestions are well worth considering, especially given his final conclusion: "I've yet to watch another life that seems to have brought more pleasure to its owner than mine has to me."
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"Before I Say Goodbye"
by Ruth Picardie
I loved the hell out of this tiny little book, and found myself crying and laughing simultaneously more than once in the course of reading it, as passage upon passage made me yell, "Yes! EXACTLY like that!" A chocolate-loving, fashion-obsessed, British freelance writer, Ruth Picardie was 32 years old and happily married with one-year old twins at diagnosis. She wrote a (cruelly short) series of columns on her experience of breast cancer for the Observer newspaper before her death a year later. This book is a collection of those columns and her correspondence with friends, readers and family. As her husband Matt writes: "There was a rough-tough bravado about Ruth's black humour: it was a way not so much of facing the truth, as of trying to face it down; a means of both acknowledging the inevitable and denying it, in a shriek of raucous laughter." I finished it thinking what a different place this world would be if we were all so honest, both with ourselves and each other. What a concept.
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"The Measure of our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness"
by Jerome Groopman, M.D.
Dr. Jerome Groopman sketches brief but eloquent portraits of eight patients in this rumination on illness, spirituality, modern science, living and dying. As a leading researcher in the fields of cancer and AIDS, he is certainly well-acquainted with death, and he presents the book as an attempt to "capture and illuminate [the] complexity" of issues of illness and mortality, as well as the "biological and emotional circumstances surrounding death." However, this book is definitively about life and living. He reveals his own insights-- as well as those of his patients and their loved ones-- gained in the face of struggles against life-threatening illness, win or lose. Although I found it hard to completely believe the good doctor¹s self-portrayal this side of sainthood, that niggling doubt in no way taints what I gained from his patients' stories. And if he is, indeed, all that he claims to be--well, then, this book should be required reading of all med students and I want him to be MY doctor.
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"The Red Devil"
by Katherine Russell Rich
The first sentence of Katherine Russell Rich's book, "The Red Devil," smacks you in the face: "I found the lump twenty minutes before breakfast, three weeks after my marriage broke up." From there the blows continue as we go with her on a solitary ride through what she calls Cancerland: to a biopsy, on dates, on vacation, to work, out of work, to different apartments she calls home, to and from hospitals. But there's no wincing from the blows. You feel yourself the happy masochist, loving the pain since, like the very best books, "The Red Devil" is funny and grave at once. You go with Rich to the worst places, but there's no sentimentality or annoying self-pity there. The book is never sappy, often laugh-out-loud hilarious, and it has something to say to anybody who picks it up: cancer patient, shrink, oncologist, date of cancer patient, Mom, editor, taxi driver of cancer patient. It's honest and it pulls no punches. Rich, a successful magazine editor in New York, began treatments for breast cancer in her early thirties. She documents with sharp accuracy the pressure she put on herself to remain "normal" and career-focused throughout her ordeal: working, dating, exercising, not discussing what she was going through readily and freely. The flip side of the normal world is Cancerland: a more lonely and inscrutable place, where doctors don't want to diagnose you with cancer and your life necessarily picks up pace to what Rich describes as doubletime. Anything starts to go, as in an interlude with a homeless man who asks for change after Rich has just lost her job for no real reason: "I'm looking for work."
"Me, too!" I exclaimed. "I don't have a job either."
"Well, at least you have your health," he said, backing off.
"Actually, that's not true," I said, on a roll. "I had cancer."
"Well, everyone's got problems," he said snappishly, and walked away. That interlude typifies your experience within "The Red Devil." Like the guy in the subway jonesing for some change, you'll approach Rich perhaps expecting something different. But you'll get to know her, and quickly. And, as I'm sure the guy in the subway did, you'll get more than you bargained for out of what she tells you.
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"It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life"
by Lance Armstrong
This memoir by cyclist Lance Armstrong is a must read for all cancer survivors, but is particularly relevant for younger people with cancer. It gave me comfort, some laughs and a huge dose of inspiration. It helped boost my positive thinking in dealing with my own cancer and made me think “if he can overcome this, I can too!” The book also illustrates that although getting cancer is not something anyone would want, the results are that the experience often gives people a unique and beautiful perspective and appreciation for what life is all about. Although the book is very well written, the story does have a bit of a speed bump that is the background chapters. Chapters two and three are a documentation of the story of Armstrong's life up to the point when he finds out that he has testicular cancer. They took a bit of work for me to get through, especially since I knew nothing about cycling. But the background information is essential in understanding who Armstrong is and what obstacles he had overcome to get to that point in his life. The following chapters, which chronicle Armstrong's journey through diagnosis and treatment are poignant, especially for those of us who have been through it. I felt a certain connection with Armstrong as he described the difficulties of treatment, and his interactions with caregivers who play a crucial role for any cancer patient. Armstrong makes it a point to leave the moments of humor that he experiences in the story –something we all can use to help us cope. The rest of the book deals with Armstrong's physical and emotional journey back into cycling, a journey that was aided by the support of Armstrong's new wife, Kristin. These chapters are very detailed, and I didn't mind learning about cycling because it was worth it to get to the very exciting conclusion of the story. I found myself cheering for Armstrong as he proved to all those who said he couldn't do it that he is the best cyclist of our lifetime! And through all he has accomplished, Armstrong insists that the most important title he holds is that of “Cancer Survivor”.
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"Cancer Happens: Coming of Age with Cancer"
by Rebecca Gifford
Most cancer books deal with patients who are children or seniors, or mature women with breast cancer. Rebecca Gifford was stricken as a young adult, fresh out of college and eager to begin an exciting new job. Initially she asked her doctor about the back spasms she had been having. Two months later, she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. During the next two years, Rebecca endured chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, the loss of her independence, and the collapse of her budding career. In this honest and probing memoir, Rebecca tells it like it was––from hair loss to confinement, therapy groups, lack of sex, funerals, morphine, premature menopause, professional humiliation, and much, much more. She explores the wide range of emotions many cancer patients deny like anger, defiance, and vanity and openly shares the ordeal of living through cancer. In this illuminating look at the uncensored thoughts and feelings of an average person fighting an extraordinary struggle, Rebecca tells the reader in no uncertain terms what cancer did to her and for her. To contact Rebecca or for more information about Cancer Happens, please visit www.cancerhappens.com
"Facing the Mirror with Cancer"
by Lori Ovitz
If you're looking for something to get that hard-to-shop-for cancer patient, search no longer. Lori Ovitz, make-up artist to the stars, has created a step-by-step guide to makeup and beauty for cancer survivors during treatment and beyond. Women, men, teens -- this book is for anyone who needs help dealing with the physical side effects of cancer treatments. Using simple, well-illustrated techniques, the book gives survivors power over their appearance, and mixed in with the beauty advice and instruction are inspirational quotations and testimonials from other survivors who were aided by Lori's expertise. The result is a straightforward handbook that is encouraging and easy to use. (Bonus: First 10 people to send us their tips for looking and feeling good get a free copy! Email pc@planetcancer.org)
Planet Cancer will receive 20% of the proceeds if you buy it now!
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"My One Night Stand with Cancer"
by Tania Katan
Review by M.K. Zeeb:
I recently attended a banana-pancake party in Phoenix. After lots of maple syrup and coffee, we began to play a game inspired by Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. Firefighters in his book don't put out fires; instead, they facilitate the safe burning of books. As a result of all the book-burning, a secret subculture forms, in which each member of the community commits to the memorization of at least one book for posterity. We see people on their deathbeds as they recite their books out loud to younger aspiring memorizers. The pancake party question: What book would you choose to memorize? The responses were interesting. James Joyce came up, something by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, Joy Williams' The Quick and the Dead, Catcher in the Rye, the Harry Potter series, Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter, a book of poems called Crush, Midnight's Children by Salmon Rushdie. I was so stressed out. I couldn't decide. The decision felt too big. But, now I know. I would choose Tania Katan's memoir My One-night Stand With Cancer. I just finished reading it sixteen minutes ago, and I feel smarter, funnier, stronger, more kind and humble and open. I don't know how to reflect my experience with reading this book. Perhaps Tania Katan is indescribable and can only be experienced. What I do know is that her book will change you. It will expand who you are. You will become a better friend, a better lover, a better thinker and feeler and griever, a playmate, a liver of life. It takes an artist to live this life, and Tania Katan lets you live with her through three surgeries, four diagnoses, two lumpy girlfriends (who find lumps in her breasts), at least three revenge fantasies, one very funny snuggly therapist, who becomes the "older woman," a strange and devoted family of five, a 10K race (which she runs topless and double-mastectomized), and one story of finding the love of her life, someone to feel with, to collaborate with, to play with. At one point Katan says how much she loves moving in and out of complete honesty and utter silliness. And she obviously lives what she loves. And writes how she lives. Katan's voice is clear and rare, as is her story. Her writing is layered and kinky, smart, full of body and humor. And music. Like Mozart meets disco?deep and bursting. This memoir includes cancer, but it is not about cancer. It is about love, sincerity, and living imaginatively. It is about surrender and deep listening, bodies in motion, and freedom and sex. It will invite you to have a total response, to participate in your life with gusto and faith. Faith in friends. Faith in healing. Faith in love.

"Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips"
by Kris Carr
From the woman who brought us the unprecedented documentary "Crazy Sexy Cancer," here is the handbook every cancer cowgirl needs!Every golden tool for the journey is in this book. Finding the right doctor, navigating insurance companies, stylish hospital gowns, dating, sex, changing appearances, nutrition, spirituality, fertility etc, etc. Grab a copy for yourself or pass it onto someone you love. It's a nitty gritty manual for facing cancer head on.Kris and twelve other cancer surviving divas share their stories, their insights, and their drive to kick cancer's butt with grace humor and attitude. For more information visit the website www.crazysexycancer.com
Keep Climbing: How I Beat Cancer and Reached the Top of the World
by Sean Swarner
Sean Swarner's book is all about hope and for good reason. Sean was twice given only weeks to live when he was diagnosed with two different kinds of cancer. He not only beat both kinds of cancer, but he has gone on to amazing heights--namely, the top of the world. Sean was the first cancer survivor to climb Mt. Everest and he did so with partial use of his lungs.In his book, we follow Sean through his high school years when he was fighting cancer to his personal struggle with survivorship during and after college. The book is about life and how we all, especially cancer survivors, have our obstacles to overcome. Sean proves that if you put your mind to something, almost anything is possible. You will laugh and you will cry when you read this book but, more important, you will be inspired.
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"Hope Begins in the Dark"
by Jamie Reno
Lymphoma is the most common blood cancer with close to 70,000 new cases a year. Jamie Reno is an 11 year cancer survivor and knows that we all need hope when battling cancer. He is a veteran, award-winning journalist with NEWSWEEK and his book is an amazing compilation of 50 lymphoma survivors telling their personal stories in their own words.The wonderful thing about the book is that these 50 people come from all walks of life. From Larry Luchino, CEO of the Boston Red Sox, to Maddox Johnson, a 9 year old cancer survivor; this book will definitely inspire you. The thing about cancer is that everyone reacts differently when they hear the words, "you have cancer". The same goes for the 50 survivors in this book; the one commonality is that they put on their boxing gloves and fought until they had no more fight left in their body. They all have a very unique outlook on life and I am certain you will find inspiration and hope from their personal stories. The book is not only inspirational, but informative as well.
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Everything Changes: The Insider's Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s
by Kairol Rosenthal

EVERYTHING CHANGES: The Insider’s Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s dusts the sugarcoating off the young adult cancer experience to uncover gritty and ultra-confessional stories of fear, tenacity, jealousy, frustration, embarrassment, and hope. From sex toys to assisted suicide, and COBRA payments to clubbing during chemo, the unvarnished stories in EVERYTHING CHANGES reveal what most young survivors are thinking but few have the nerve to say.

Emerging from cancer treatment at age 29, choreographer and writer Kairol Rosenthal embarked on a 5-year journey across the country interviewing young men and women living with cancer. From the Bible Belt to the Big Apple and beyond, 25 perfect strangers confessed to her what they would not divulge to their doctors, therapists, friends, lovers, family, or in support groups.

Part travelogue, diary, and investigative reporting, EVERYTHING CHANGES includes an unprecedented compilation of expert advice and extensive resources on young adult cancer topics such as dating and sex, medical insurance and the healthcare system, faith and spirituality, employment and career, fertility, adoption, and parenting, friends and family, clinical trials and alternative medicine, college life and scholarships, and young adult caregiving.

Vist the blog: http://everythingchangesbook.com/ to download Chapter One for free.
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"Rodeo in Joliet"
by Glenn Rockowitz
Glenn Rockowitz’s new book, Rodeo in Joliet, is a glimpse into the mind of the author after his cancer diagnosis at 28, when he is diagnosed weeks before the birth of his only son, and given three months to live. Ironically, his father is diagnosed a week later, and his cancer journey parallels and then diverges from Glenn’s during the window of time covered in this book.

Be forewarned: it is not easy to be in Glenn Rockowitz’s head. As he is staring down his own death, he doesn’t much care whether you like him or not. There is plenty of dark humor, vomit and absolutely no sugarcoating. You will see, hear, taste and smell his cancer experience, including the rollercoaster of volatile emotions and occasional self-sabotage during his Hail Mary experimental treatment. And as he white-knuckles his way through the cancer trenches, you can’t help but come around to root for him.
Rodeo is billed as a cancer memoir because of the subject but…not so fast. As he sees it, “I don’t see this book as a cancer book as much as I see it as a father-son-father-son book. I loved my dad and I miss him. And it's hard to get over the sense of being scared shitless every fucking day of not getting to see my own boy grow up…I wanted my son to have an account of that time in his life. I wanted him to know how deeply I loved him and fought to stay alive for him.”
So let’s call it a love letter: a visceral, powerful love letter from a man to his father and to his son that will leave you gasping and grateful to be alive when you reach the final page.
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