Surviving Crisis: Twenty Prominent Authors Write about Events That Shaped Their Lives, and: Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer (review)

266Fourth Genre descended from us perhaps would know stories about us . . . and then the stories would fade." In writing Family, Frazier preserves, as does Epstein, the intimate famüy history enfolded in national history. Joyce Greenberg Lott When my husband lay on the operating table at Sloan Kettering, I sat in the waiting room reading Surviving Crisis. I needed to read these stories, far more than the self-help books that weU-meaning friends had given me or the magazines that others were thumbing through. I had the same feeling several months later, reading Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer. I recommend both ofthese essay coUections for getting through bad times with dignity, insight, and wit. The first is also exceUent for students; the second, for anyone struggUng with breast cancer. Surviving Crisis: Twenty Prominent Authors Write about Events That Shaped Their Lives, edited by Lee Gutkind. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1997. 238 pages, paperback, $15.95. In this coUection, twenty prominent authors—including Annie Dülard, John McPhee, Richard Rodriguez, andJohnWideman—write about crises that shaped their lives. Some are less catastrophic than others—at least to the reader. For example, Carol Kloss in "Fat" writes about drawing fat people at the maU and sucking "heavy, sweet, dark sauce from chopped-up bones in the food court. . . ." Some treat catastrophe with humor, such as Majorie Gross, who, in "Cancer Becomes Me," uses it to resist feeUng like a victim: "The other side effect (of uterine cancer) is that I've lost twenty pounds, which has sent my women friends into spasms ofjealousy." Editor Lee Gutkind introduces each essay with a few words about the author and some comment on craft, which enhance each story. Although the topics seem depressing— stories about suicide attempts, self-mutilation, juvenfle court, abandonment, date rape—the reader feels strangely upUfted. Maybe it is the courage of these writers; or maybe it is the opportunity to see life in aU its glory—what might be caUed its ugUness left uncovered, and so easier to live with. Book Reviews267 Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer, edited by Hilda Raz. Persea Books, NewYork, 1999. 285 pages, $25.95. Poets and writers often use their own Uves as source material, but not always in personal terms. So when LuciUe Clifton, MarUyn Hacker, Maxine Kumin, AUcia Ostriker, and fourteen other exciting writers ofpoetry, fiction, journaUsm, and scholarship teU readers what reaUy happened to them when they had breast cancer, it is an event worth noting. The book includes poems, personal essays, shaped journals, and interviews in a satisfying mix of lyricism , humor, information, and self-revelation. CoUectively, these voices offer an alternative to fear—whether it's LuciUe CUfton's poetry asking, "what is the splendor of one breast/on one woman?"; Maxine Kumin relating her struggles with a doctor intent on usurping her decisions; Annette WiUiams Jaffee's brave efforts to break the cycle of genetic legacy that caused her to lose her mother and aunts so young: "My mother was dying in the front bedroom but I was on the porch eating those tart green grapes"; Alicia Ostriker's "Scenes from a Mastectomy," which depicts a marriage handfing a mastectomy ; Mimi Schwartz's misadventures at a "Reach for Recovery" conference ; Pamela Post's empathy to rock in the middle of the night with the woman in the next hospital bed, feeUng her pain "as much as the surgeon's knife"—and many more. Not aU the explorations are personal, though. There is an informative interview with Dr. Susan Love, the breast cancer activist, andJudith HaU s piece on Fanny Burney's mastectomy without anesthesia in 1811. The book's title, says editor Hilda Raz, refers to clean margins that those with cancer hope for, indicating no cancer spread. But life is on the margins , and the question is, how weU do we manage this? Very well—is the inspiring message ofthese women writers who ffll in, as Raz says, the "margin of missing literature [that] surrounds breast cancer." Elizabeth Templeman With my memory for detail ever more unreliable, and my love of fine prose fairly constant, I believe I could spend...