Rewriting Illness bookcover

Rewriting Illness

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Description

By turns somber and funny but above all provocative, Elizabeth Benedict's Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own is a most unconventional memoir. With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the story-telling skills of a seasoned novelist, she brings to life her cancer diagnosis and committed hypochondria. As she discovers multiplying lumps in her armpit, she describes her initial terror, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity as she indulges in "natural remedies," among them chanting Tibetan mantras, drinking shots of wheat grass, and finding medicinal properties in chocolate babka. She tracks the progression of her illness from muddled diagnosis to debilitating treatment as she gathers sustenance from her family and an assortment of urbane, ironic friends, including her fearless "cancer guru."

In brief, explosive chapters with startling titles - "Was it the Krazy Glue?" and "Not Everything Scares the Shit out of Me" - Benedict investigates existential questions: Is there a cancer personality? Can trauma be passed on generationally? Can cancer be stripped of its warlike metaphors? How do doctors' own fears influence their comments to patients? Is there a gendered response to illness? Why isn't illness one of literature's great subjects? And delving into her own history, she wonders if having had children would have changed her life as a writer and hypochondriac. Post diagnosis, Benedict asks, "Which fear is worse: the fear of knowing or the reality of knowing? (164)"

Throughout, Benedict's humor, wisdom, and warmth jacket her fears, which are personal, political, and ultimately global, when the world is pitched into a pandemic. Amid weighty concerns and her all-consuming obsession with illness, her story is filled with suspense, secrets, and even the unexpected solace of silence.

Product Details

PublisherMandel Vilar Press
Publish DateMay 23, 2023
Pages216
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781942134916
Dimensions8.9 X 5.9 X 0.9 inches | 0.8 pounds

About the Author

Elizabeth Benedict is a best-selling novelist, journalist, teacher of creative writing, editor and writing coach. She has published five acclaimed novels including the national bestseller, Almost, and the National Book Award finalist, Slow Dancing, authored the classic book on writing about sex in fiction, The Joy of Writing Sex, in print for 25 years. Her personal essays have been selected as "Notable" in four editions of Best American Essays. She has written reviews and articles for The New York Times, Boston Globe, Esquire, Real Simple, and Daedalus, and been a regular contributor to Japanese Playboy, Huffington Post and Salmagundi, writing on sexual politics, money, and literature, and on figures from Monica Lewinsky to British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.

She conceived of and edited three prominent anthologies, including the New York Times Bestseller, What My Mother Gave Me: 31 Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most (2013); Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives; and Me, My Hair, and I: 27 Women Untangle an Obsession(2015). Her books are featured regularly in reviews and interviews on All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and many other public radio shows, including the BBC's "Women's Hour, " and Australia Public Radio. She has taught creative writing at Princeton, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Columbia, and is on the Fiction Faculty at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

Reviews

KIRKUS REVIEWS Issue of April 1, 2023: A fine antidote to anodyne cancer accounts.

A New York City cancer memoir informed by Susan Sontag and Nora Ephron.

"I first read Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor in 1992," writes Benedict, "curious about it as a writer and still an inhabitant of the kingdom of the well." Sontag's work, she writes, is "a touchstone, a learned investigation on a disease that's still baffling, still killing." Benedict chronicles many seemingly mundane activities that assumed greater resonance after her own diagnosis: visiting Zabar's for chocolate babka when anxiety took away the ability to stomach anything else; picking up a puzzle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop before starting treatment at the facility that treated Ephron; taking a chemo-driven walk through Central Park in the middle of December. These and other aspects of the author's cancer experience will be less relatable to readers who, for instance, cannot share their pathology report with a good friend who used to run a major New York City hospital. Of course, illness is a great leveler, and privilege neither eliminates the fear of death nor guarantees a cure--though it may increase the chances. As Benedict shows, the "best" doctors still struggle with communication, and even the empowered can lose their voices in front of the lab coat. The author mostly resists the standard tropes of illness memoirs and compiles her thoughts not in chapters but brief episodes, which allows her to explore the range of her reactions to the disease she spent a life fearing. She invokes both the writing and silence of Sontag and Ephron--her cancer "support group"--and sometimes tamps down the emotional intensity of her experiences with analysis or humor. Throughout, there are a host of deeply moving moments-- e.g., sharing her diagnosis with her adult stepdaughter or wrestling with the death of a close friend.



Rewriting Illness Elizabeth Benedict's eighth book, will mess with you -- in irresistible ways. Despite its scary subject, this chronicle reads more like a breathtaking whodunnit -- or rather, a whatdunnit... Best of all, Benedict's writing sparkles.... Benedict whips language around like a gunslinger.... For all its roller-coaster terrors, Benedict's story ... amuses and entertains, even while we're clutching the book pop-eyed.... Benedict's fearless descriptions of how every step (and misstep) felt, are mesmerizing.... Give it to friends. It's supremely worth the journey." Boston Globe

"A New York City cancer memoir informed by Susan Sontag and Nora Ephron.... A fine antidote to anodyne cancer accounts. Kirkus Reviews


"Her surprisingly entertaining memoir should be required reading for every medical student, resident, and physician, prompting us to reflect on how we talk to and care for our patients - an ideal teaching tool." Kathy G. Niknejad, MD, Faculty, Harvard Medical School

"When I finished the book, I felt like I had made a new friend, and all I wanted was to keep our conversation going. This is more than a memoir; it's an experience." --Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone & co-host of the "Dear Therapists" podcast


"By turns witty, vivid, and harrowing, Rewriting Illness reads as though Nora Ephron had written a book called, 'I Feel Bad About My Tumor.' Especially good on the abrupt, stopped time feeling when the flow of life - city life, complicated life, sentient life - collides with illness." -Thomas Beller, Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball.

"It's not courage unless you're afraid, and Elizabeth Benedict has courage - and fear - in abundance, in this frank, riveting and often hilarious memoir. If you've had cancer, or love someone who's had or has it, or are just plain afraid of it -- that's to say pretty much everyone -- then you'll want to read this book." Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children; The Woman Upstairs

'Memoirs of serious illness are often good suspense stories, and this one is a page-turner. I read Elizabeth Benedict's Rewriting Illness in a single sitting and finished it infinitely more knowledgeable about what it means to be diagnosed with cancer. Here is someone who's figured out not only how to think about the unthinkable but how to turn her experience into an honest, gripping, and genuinely humorous story. It's the kind of inspiring book you want to share with all the important people in your life." -- Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through and The Friend.

"Elizabeth's Benedict's beautiful, brave memoir about her own fears, especially fear of illness, which was eventually realized and had to be overcome, has so much to say about rational and irrational anxieties and the way they haunt women and deprive us of the larger life we crave." --Katha Pollitt, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories; Subject to Debate: Sense.

"Rewriting Illness is a superbly intelligent and surprisingly entertaining memoir about what happens when a lifelong fear of illness collides at last with illness itself. Elizabeth Benedict applies her formidable talents as a novelist to bringing to life the scenes and characters from her annus horribilis dealing with lymphoma. She writes with an honesty and a sly sense of humor about herself that make this book hard to put down." --Stephen McCauley, author of My Ex-Life

"The moment every woman dread of finding a lump where no lump should be is the jumping off point for Elizabeth Benedict's startling, self-aware, and wickedly funny memoir. Whether she's describing her sister teaching her Tibetan chants to calm her nerves, the big city doctors who dismiss her concerns, or her problems with Susan Sontag's cancer metaphor critique, Benedict brings a novelist's deft storytelling to a narrative we think we already know. It's full of drama, humor, essential lessons for dealing with doctors, crushing vulnerability -- and wonderfully -- plenty of hope." --Mara Liasson, NPR, National Political Correspondent

"I devoured Elizabeth Benedict's beautiful book in one sitting--truly couldn't put it down. I'm moved and astonished by how she made her cancer story universal, even for someone who is not yet, knock wood, a member of that club. Brava for this forthright and fascinating account." -- Betsy West, documentary director (RBG, Julia, Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down)

"Nuanced, thoughtful, with not a cliché in sight, Elizabeth Benedict's memoir is impossible to put down because the rich inner life of the writer―this excellent writer―is so compelling. The story she tells―vividly, in fits and starts, as it happened--is a reflection of encountering the unpredictable vicissitudes of life, and its one certainty."-- Katherine Dalsimer, Dept. of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer and Female Adolescence Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature

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