At some point, it became a mark of privilege to talk about “self-care.” Once unknown outside the niches of trauma therapists and burned-out activists, the concept has become so mainstream that it’s ...
Tag: Cancer
Analytic Rage: The Genius of Jenny Diski
I picked up a copy of Jenny Diski’s first novel, Nothing Natural, at random a few decades ago at an airport bookstore. I read it on the flight from Heathrow to JFK with a degree of shocked ...
Show Me Where It Hurts: Part 1
Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in ...
On Longer Lives and Longer Deaths
America has many open secrets. The nursing home is one of them. We try not to think too hard or too long about its residents or its low-wage staff. We’ll confront its smell, its humiliations, its bleakness, only once we need it ...
A Head of His Time
Recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, John Corey Whaley’s eagerly awaited second novel, Noggin, promises second chances: life after death. Or not death ...
This Morning Was a Poem: On and Near Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby
Rebecca Solnit’s new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, is a morning poem. Last summer, I sat outside on a covered patio beneath the awning and read it straight through. I read for hours. The book had been ...
Cancer’s Poison Gift
S. Lochlann Jain’s Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us is both a memoir of the author’s personal journey as a cancer patient and a trenchant analysis of why preventing cancer has never been an American ...
People in Trouble
“My Awesome Place is truly the result of a massive community effort …”1 When the poet and performance artist Cheryl Burke died at the age of 38 from complications related to the treatment of ...