BECAUSE COWARDS GET CANCER TOO:
A Hypochondriac Confronts His Nemesis
By John Diamond
Times Books, 216 pages, $20
THE RED DEVIL: To Hell With Cancer–and Back
By Katherine Russell Rich
Crown, 242 pages, $22
FINDING MY VOICE
By Diane Rehm
Knopf, 246 pages, $24
Aldous Huxley once said, “Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.” Journalists–maybe it’s in their blood–tend to tack on: “and then you write about it.”
Three journalists–Diane Rehm, a National Public Radio talk-show host; Katherine Russell Rich, a beauty-magazine editor; and John Diamond, a London Times columnist–have done just that: They’ve taken their life experiences with serious illness and chronicled them, letting their stories act as road maps and inspirations. Of course, these memoirs aren’t entirely altruistic; each book–more so the actual writing process–without doubt served as a cathartic tool for the authors as well. “I know, as does every third-rate psychotherapist, that writing things down helps,” John Diamond says in his book. “I write for a living: I earn the mortgage money translating what I see and hear and feel into words on the printed page. And while I’ve never been convinced about the service I thus provide to the public, . . . (w)ho, given the opportunity and the diagnosis, wouldn’t want to write about it?”
The statement many journalism students print in bold on the first notebook page is true: “Writers write.” And what they tend to write best is what they know best. It seems natural, yet the memoir has come under loud criticism of late. Critics blast: “Who are these people who need to tell all, and who are these readers who have an insatiable need to know?”
There’s a big difference between those memoirs that gloat, “And you thought your life was bad/your family was dysfunctional/your childhood was lousy, well let me tell you . . .” and memoirs such as these three, which have no agenda of one-upping, spilling secrets or surmounting that peak of ultimate, inconceivable treachery. No, these disparate memoirs are not tell-alls, or retribution tomes, or please-feel-sorry-for-me-pleas. These are memoirs that remind us of the importance of relating to others, and of learning from and being inspired by others, and by the written word.
The best written of the bunch is by far Diamond’s “Because Cowards Get Cancer Too: A Hypochondriac Confronts His Nemesis.” Despite the unsavory title, Diamond succeeds in lending beautiful prose to a treacherous time. A significant part of the book appeared in one form or another throughout Diamond’s newspaper column. He tells his story of being diagnosed with invasive throat cancer, operated on, operated on again, and then dealing with the consequences, all the while maintaining a sharp wit and a literary prowess. Of course, the book would hit home much more if Diamond was as familiar and beloved a columnist here as he is in England. But still, it has shining moments that are universal, and it is quite enlightening about the British system of medicine. Diamond’s writing is vivid, often shooting right to the pit of the stomach:
“Imagine you turn up at a dinner party with a dozen people and there in the middle of the long side of the table is a bloke you’ve never met before, and he’s not eating. It’s not that he’s not eating in the way that humorless vegetarians don’t eat, or in the manner of those stick-thin women who say, `That was delicious and I’m so full,’ in the hope that if they gush enough you won’t notice they sucked briefly on a couple of beans and hid a shiitake mushroom under their fork.
“No: he’s not eating as if this simply isn’t an eating occasion, as if nobody told him that food would be served. There is a plate, but it is empty, and cutlery too, but it is untouched.
“Well, you’d say something, wouldn’t you?
” `Can I pass you anything?’ said a woman as if she wasn’t sure whether I’d noticed the food piled up along the table. `What would you like?’ said another, hesitantly, as if I might be subject to delusions and expect to be fed off gold plate.
” `Nothing, thanks.’ I grinned as if not eating were one of the usual options at dinner parties. What could I say? Egocentrically, it hadn’t occurred to me that people wouldn’t know, and you can’t just smile and say, `No, nothing for me: I’ve got cancer,’ can you?”
Rich’s “The Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer–and Back” was titled in honor of the red chemotherapy medication, Adriamycin, that’s responsible for hair loss. “The Red Devil” is by far the punchiest of these three memoirs. It is a quick read; even the harrowing parts are handled delicately and with wit. While the writing often gets bogged down with strings of elusive metaphors, there are numerous gems throughout–keen insights that really pinpoint what it’s like to be a 30-something career woman on the fast track only to have everything come crashing down. For Rich, that not only meant breast cancer but also divorce.
“In Cancerland,” she writes, “I was just beginning to learn, people are forced to live in two time zones at once. We exist on cancer’s time and real-world time simultaneously. We continue to care about our love lives and careers and vacations and retirement plans–about the big and the small–but with a particular urgency, since the clock is racing, double time. This double time magnifies all our emotions: Compassion and sorrow. Fear and relief. Irritation and joy–the first, because each day has to be redemption; the second, because each day is.”
Quite the opposite, “Finding My Voice” chronicles Rehm’s life and career far more than her diagnosis with a rare neurological disorder, spasmodic dysphonia, which affected one of her most important tools–her vocal cords. Although Rehm is the most notable of the three journalists, much of her story, unlike her dynamic broadcasting, is ho-hum. She grew up in Washington, D.C., in a family that had a relative–though not extreme by today’s standards–amount of dysfunction; namely, her parents squashed Rehm’s self-esteem and self-worth rather than fostering it. The lack of excitement, however, actually adds an interesting twist to Rehm’s memoir, providing the theme throughout that here’s a woman who had been taught to aspire minimally, if at all; who had no college education; who, up until her early 40s, was a homemaker plagued by self-doubt–and now, she has interviewed most of the influential people of our time as the host of “The Diane Rehm Show” broadcast daily on NPR since 1979.
“It’s important to understand that way back in 1973, public radio was just beginning to get off the ground,” Rehm writes. “National Public Radio was a little-known broadcast entity, and WAMU was a small member station with just two or three full-time staff members. It was a time of growth and experimentation, a time when an inexperienced person like me could venture onto the airwaves without training, as long as she had something to say. The miraculous part was how natural it all felt, walking into the broadcast studio for the first time, gazing at the four microphones on the large round table, looking through the glass as the engineer readied the tapes and adjusted the voice levels. . . .
“I’ve wondered over the years whether (my) lack of stage fright came from my years of pleasure listening to the radio, or whether it came from years of acting in school and community plays, when I forgot everything other than what I knew I had to do. Whatever the source, I felt grateful that my first time on the air had been so rewarding and hadn’t been a disaster. Probably if I’d known beforehand that I was going to be asked to participate in the program, I would have been a nervous wreck.”
Nothing in any of these three books will be shocking or lurid: No lies are uncovered, not much dirt is dug up on anyone (save a brief description of one of Rehm’s first interviews with actor Tony Randall). Yet, life stories have a place–they are what bind us to one another–and no one can tell a story better than one who has, him or herself, lived it.
