book reviews: New Perspectives From Cancer Patients - NYTimes.com

New Perspectives From Cancer Patients - NYTimes.com

".......That is Susan Gubar’s staggering, searing “Memoir of a Debulked Woman.” Ms. Gubar may not be a health professional, but as a noted feminist critic (she is an author of the influential 1970s classic “Madwoman in the Attic”), she has certainly spent a career immersed in the meaning and functions of the female body. In one of those inexplicably savage medical ironies, she was felled in her early 60s by the worst of the “female” diseases: ovarian cancer. As is common, it had spread throughout her abdomen by the time of diagnosis.

Cases like Ms. Gubar’s are usually first treated with the surgical removal of as much cancer as possible, along with all dispensable abdominal organs that are affected or at risk. This is the “debulking” of her title, and it is about as close to evisceration as civilians can experience. It became her focal metaphor for the experience of sudden dire illness, as all other interests drop away save “an overriding and offensive obsession with one’s own physical vulnerability.” On a less literary note, the procedure winds up bringing her almost more physical grief than the cancer itself.

Ms. Gubar moves back and forth between poet and patient, with the occasional sidestep into academic mode as she reviews writing by women affected with similar illness. It is a difficult and potentially cringe-making project.

But even the most skeptical and finicky reader — even the healthy reader, even the healthy male reader — will not put this book down. Some of its appeal comes from Ms. Gubar’s skill with textual analysis, and some from various appealing verbal shenanigans (has anyone else found and pondered the “mother” in chemotherapy, for instance?). Most gripping, though, is her frank, courageous account of life with a horrific postoperative infection in her large intestine that came to involve the buttock area....