Reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s spectacular memoir When Breath Becomes Air, a meditation about love, literature and science in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis was a strange experience “The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats and Stephen Crane,” Kalanithi wrote to a friend. “The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.” He was trying to be funny, using the kind of dark humor you get from people facing the unfaceable. But it also revealed Kalanithi’s tremendous ambition. He […]
Know Your Enemy
Like most people, I find pretty much everything about cancer terrifying. It doesn’t help that I’ve chosen a profession [Firefighter] that has all kinds of increased rates of cancer. Most of us at work don’t even like to talk about it because it reminds us that the unknown and uncontrollable might hit us at anytime. So you might wonder why I chose to read The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Every once in a while I like to delve […]
Do not try to sing the title to the tune of “The Circle of Life”
It’s weird, sometimes, how much other people’s stories can mean to you. It’s part of the reason I love reading (good) memoirs – coming across that one story, that one line in their tale, that hits you right in the heart, or the head, or rings some distant memory bell of your own. The thing that makes you see that people – with all their infinite indiviualities – still have so many little points of connection. And that’s how I felt reading The Story of […]
Me and Earl Turned Me Into the Crying Girl
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a fantastic book. It’s a book about friendship, navigating the world of high school and yeah, it’s about cancer and loss. Now I just said that it was a fantastic book, I think for the first time in my adult life I’m going to utter the phrase, “I think that the movie may be better”. Greg has some interesting ideas on how to get through high school. It mostly includes talking to everyone but not becoming […]