Elizabeth Benedict's Blog

This letter just arrived from a reader of REWRITING ILLNESS:

"This is the best and most hopeful book for anxious cancer survivors--which is pretty much everyone I know! I will be recommending to the gang in my Wednesday night [support] group."

Want an audiobook? Listen to me read the story -- 6 hours and 12 minutes -- on Audible. Or read it on your screen or in your lap.

Coming soon to a book group near you.
https://www.elizabethbenedict.com

Elizabeth Benedict’s ‘Rewriting Illness’ injects tragicomedy into a personal account of cancer diagnosis and treatment

By Joan Frank Globe Correspondent May 11, 2023,

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/1...

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. It may actually help readers feel better about our own natural fears, even while it confronts the worst.
Best of all, Benedict’s writing sparkles.
It’s only fitting. A novelist and essayist who teaches fiction and coaches students on their college application essays, Benedict whips language around like a gunslinger. Her account arrives in crisp, wry bites that also manage to be wittily titled: “Not Everything Scares the S—t out of Me” or “One Night I Touched My Arm.”
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Hypochondriacs and catastrophists? She’s got your backs, opening with the moment her own lifelong, free-range hypochondria probably began — when a sweet high school classmate suddenly died of Hodgkin’s disease. That shock stuck. “I had barely known the girl. ... yet she had lurked in my consciousness ... prepared to pounce and shout ... ’Now it’s your turn!’”
And lo: “[L]ate one night in early June 2017... I crossed my left arm over my chest and stuck it in my armpit, and there it was.” A lump. Also a “vague sensation,”as if that of “a tiny pellet floating inside me.”
It takes not one nanosecond (especially for women) to grasp: this could be me. Moreover, our paranoia’s justified. “If I added up the hours I had spent anticipating the moment I’d feel a lump where no lump should be ... I knew my own fears were extreme.” Benedict also allows that the dreaded moment “turns out to be every bit as terrifying” as she’d imagined.

How do we learn to write? By reading and by trial and error. By putting ourselves and our work out there -- and taking criticism from friends, strangers, and loved ones.

When I knew I wanted to write about my harrowing encounter with the medical world and with cancer, the project wasn't easy, even though I've written 10 or 11 books, depending on how you count.

But how to bring something new to a familiar, even clichéd, story?

I didn't join a support group, but I relied on the work of other writers who'd been through the experience: Nora Ephron, Jenny Diski, and Susan Sontag.

My new essay in THE MILLIONS is about how I came to write REWRITING ILLNESS: A VIEW OF MY OWN.

Readers have said it's good advice for all kinds of memoirs. I hope you'll read it and let me know what you think!

"Two distinct voices warred as I wrote and rewrote. My friend’s Kate’s: “You have to do this. It will be so helpful to people going through what you went through.” And my friend Bob’s: “I never want to read another cancer memoir!”

READ THE REST: https://tinyurl.com/bp992y6v

You can't win if you don't play. Sign up now for the REWRITING ILLNESS Giveaway.
Why read it? Bec Sigrid Nunez said: "Memoirs of serious illness are often good suspense stories, and this one is a page-turner…” Thomas Beller: "Witty, vivid and harrowing, as though Nora Ephron had written a book called 'I Feel Bad About My Tumor.'" A Harvard medical school prof: "Should be required reading for med students, residents and physicians."
ENTER HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

I'm overjoyed by the responses from writers, therapists and other storytellers to my memoir, pub date May 23.

"In Rewriting Illness, Elizabeth Benedict isn't just rewriting the narrative she's given when she's diagnosed with cancer--she's gifting us her company, which I couldn't get enough of. With grace, wit, and refreshing candor, she turned her encounter with cancer into an intimate drama, a dark comedy, and a meditation on marriage, motherhood, friendship, secrets, fragility, and love, and in doing so, she asks us to pay attention to everything in our lives that really matters. 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, NYT bestselling author: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone & co-host of the "Dear Therapists" podcast

“Elizabeth Benedict’s book is brave, heartening and beautiful. We avert our eyes from the deep terror that she must face; she faces it and faces it down. This book is a lesson in how to live. Brava.”
*** Roxana Robinson, Sparta, Dawson’s Fall, Georgia O’Keefe: A Life.

“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 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, author of What Are You Going Through and The Friend.

“Witty, vivid, harrowing, 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, Author of J.D. Salinger, The Escape Artist and Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball

“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 … 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

"I devoured Elizabeth Benedict's beautiful book in one sitting. 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…
*** Betsy West, Documentary director (RBG, JULIA, Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down)

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

KIRKUS REVIEWS March 8. Pub date May 23

"“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.

A fine antidote to anodyne cancer accounts.

I've written a lot of novels and personal essays on everything from my hair to Monica Lewinsky to a famous murder in my family, but REWRITING ILLNESS: A VIEW OF MY OWN is my first book-length memoir. The content is courtesy of a little cancer that came my way in 2017.

The pub date is May 2023. 2023 minus 2017 means I'm still alive. And I'm not sick. Maybe call this a cancer memoir with a happy ending. (Those were the only ones I wanted to read when I was sick.)

I'd swap having had cancer for getting a book out of it, if I had that choice to make. Key words: "having had cancer." It has not recurred since my last treatments in early 2018, and the doctors say the likelihood of recurrence at this point is in "low single digits."

Does the world need another cancer memoir? I know you are asking yourself this right now. And if you're not, let me ask it for you. I struggled with this question for all the years I was writing the book, and trying to make it something other than "another cancer memoir."

When a literary critic friend read an early draft and said, "I think only your friends will be interested in this version," I took note. I rewrote it 127 times or maybe it only felt like 127. Maybe it was only 15 or 29. But when another writer friend said: "I am writing a book now with no chapters longer than 900 words," I listened up all over again. I rewrote my memoir for the 15th or 28th or 123rd time. And something happened when I did that: the short chapters -- some a paragraph of two -- changed EVERYTHING.

I was suddenly writing chapter titles like: "Not Everything Scares the Shit Out of Me," and "Maybe it was the Krazy Glue," "What Brings You Here Today?" and "Where is My Husband?" In reducing the story to bite size bits, I found my voice, or a voice in which to tell the story that had not exactly fallen into my lap but burrowed its way into my armpit in the form of a swollen lymph node that turned into three swollen lymph nodes and was eventually diagnosed as lymphoma.

I found the lump in my arm on June 9th. I went to the doctor on June 10th -- and with my health insurance, my New York moxie, an office of women doctors, and access to NYC hospitals, it took 4 months to get diagnosed. Women doctors told me my problem was my anxiety. Doctors went on vacation for the summer after doing a biopsy and telling me someone from the office would call me.... My sister taught me Buddhist chanting. I drank gallons of wheat grass juice hoping to shrink the lumps.

I had a long, long time to think about what it meant to (maybe) be sick, what it meant to have doctors who told me to stop worrying, whether Susan Sontag's ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, about cancer and its metaphors, was still relevant, what it meant to have health insurance and live in the medical capital of the world and take such a long time to figure out that the huge lump in my arm was ... cancer.

I took a lot of notes. I cried. I raged. I tried NOT to tell my husband how terrified I was every time I opened my mouth. Finally, I found a doctor known as legendary in the field who treated my unusual case. I ended up in the hospital where Nora Ephron had been treated for leukemia and had died, and I was happy to be there, because I knew it meant I was getting the best care available. I was happy even though I knew not everyone makes it out of that place alive.

I'm alive. I wrote a cancer memoir that some of my favorite writers say is "impossible to be put down" and "superbly intelligent and surprisingly entertaining," and "Witty, vivid and harrowing ... as though Nora Ephron had written a book called 'I Feel Bad About My Tumor.'"

And I was lucky enough to find a fantastic publisher, Mandel Vilar, co-publishing with Dryad Press. You can pre-order it at Bookstop.Org (to go indie) or at that other place. You can go to my website, and you can ask me for a review copy, if you're a reviewer. ElizabethBenedict.com

Thanks for reading so far. I am in your debt.
~~Liz Benedict

In honor of Mother's Day this year, I invited the contributors to my anthology, What My Mother Gave Me: 31 Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, which came out in 2013, to think about any gifts from their mothers that are helping them get through the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a time when people cannot, for the most part, visit with their families, and when those of whose mothers are gone may be missing them more acutely because of how unsettled the world is. Four contributors to the anthology have contributed thoughts. I'm honored to present them here. For myself, I think about my mother's incredible kindness, her generosity of spirit and love of people. I try to practice the first two and feel comforted by the last and try to comfort others as we all stumble through this terrible time.
To purchase the book, please visit the Algonquin/Workman website before May 25th for a 20% discount. At check-out, enter the code MOTHERSDAY20 -- and voilà.

Cheryl Pearl Sucher: “The gift my mother gave to me [in the anthology] was a bank account whose proceeds she had designated to pay for my wedding.  As I have been married for over 20 years, I am grateful that her gift allowed me to throw a great celebration during the hottest day of last century with all my friends and relatives who had supported me over the years through numerous bad relationships, family crises and sometimes sheer despair.  I think of my mother every day during this pandemic because for the last six years of her life, my mother lived as a quadriplegic on a respirator. She was the ultimate survivor, having survived ghettoes and concentration camps alongside her mother, my Bubbah, Ella Kleiner.  I remember the torture of her last years, how her attendants had to clear her lungs of phlegm, and how she could only travel for as long as the battery for her lifesaving equipment would last.  And yet, she was always brave and conscious and fiercely determined to continue.  And so her courage, which I was not able to recognize until the death of my father, her caretaker, who predeceased her, gives me strength to believe that we will get through this crisis together. Her exemplary will and hope and love were as powerful as the limits of modern medicine.  And so I pass on her gift of strength to those I know who have struggled with family and friends in hospital with Covid-19, and those who have lost loved ones to this horrible pandemic.” Lucille’s Gifts to a Daughter in Quarantine by Luanne Rice A love of reading, of going inward, imagination, a need for art: gifts from my mother. On Saturdays when I was young, she would take my sisters and me to the library and art museum. We would stock up on books, then wander through galleries and choose a work of art.   My mother would ask what is the story? Once I stood in front of a painting by Matilda Browne. It was of a house in Old Lyme, Connecticut, its garden in full summer bloom. I gazed at the windows and wondered about the family inside, what secrets they kept. Lucille and my sisters were artists; inspired, they would go home and paint—usually watercolors, sometimes oils. I would write. That house by Matilda Browne became the setting for a short story. I imagined a girl living there. The garden was idyllic, full of snapdragons and larkspur, but the girl missed her father, who had died in the war. She stole a necklace from her aunt’s jewelry box and didn’t know why.   What is the story?   My mother’s question led me to the life I have now. I live in novels, reading and writing them. At home in quarantine—worried about the world, distanced from family—I write. In my new book, there is a house with a beautiful garden.  The woman who lives there is an artist, and she has disappeared—where is she now? Is she brave? Is she afraid? Is she both?   My work is to tell her story, and in ways I still don’t fully understand, reveal my own. In sleep, my dreams are full of love and mystery, places I can’t quite get to, people across a wide bay too cold to swim. I’m alone on the other side.  
But during the day I am surrounded by people, characters I love, with art to create and stories to tell. My mother’s ghost is near, still asking that old question, and I promise to answer.  Sheila Kohler:       During these dark days, searching for comfort,  I think  of my mother.   She comes to me again and again in different disguises in my work as a writer. What gifts she has given me! She pops up as a character in so many different forms and in so many of my books, always bright and vivid on the page. I can count on her as a character to enliven the page perhaps because  I see her, feel her so clearly,  and  remember her physical presence so well. Someone said that memory and imagination live in the same house,  and I think it is true.         My mother comes to me physically through all my senses: I hear her pant slightly with the effort of pulling up the corsets she put on with some difficulty every morning ,  sweating,  and drinking a glass of soda water to help  keep her going! and then when she had the corset on settling  the tight elastic down again, garters dangling down her legs. I watched her fascinated in the shadowy bedroom in the mornings,  before she sallied forth into the South African sunlight dressed up in her closely clinging dresses, the leghorn hats with flowers around the brim to protect her fair skin,  the long pastel kid gloves, the delicate high heeled shoes. I can hear the tap-tap of her heels, the whisper of her sheer stockings. I can smell the pungent perfume. In the still afternoons she is back in her bedroom, the thick, lined curtains drawn for her siesta, an arm slung over her face, damp, dark hair clinging to her skin as she sleeps heavily in her gown.  She rises again in the evening to come forth and sit  out on the terrace, slim legs crossed, looking into the gloaming with her family around her  when the drinking begins seriously. I hear the chink of her glass. I see her throw back her head. I hear her light laugh. I have such a clear picture of her in my mind and she comes to me again and again on the page.              She was a woman of many mysteries. When I turned twelve, she told us for the first time, that she had eloped before she was eighteen, with a young Jewish man,   who worked with her father in the diamond industry. Her marriage was annulled by her parents, and she spent nine months with her three maiden aunts in Kimberley, the diamond town. I can only suspect there was a love child.  Then again in her thirties she was married to my father who divorced his wife to marry a woman twenty years younger than he. She may have been the first wife’s housekeeper or perhaps practical nurse. I have written about my mother in "Love Child" and in “The House on R Street” where she runs to catch the tram in Johannesburg to go and see Rudolph Valentino playing the Sheik;  she comes to me  now again in a new book I am embarked up, where I feel her presence, hear her telling me to buck up and put a little lipstick on; but she is the one who is stealing the show. She  comes to me again and again and enables me to return to the page always searching to uncover her secrets with the kind of perseverance only hope,  which comes from her ultimately loving presence, can bring. 

I'm delighted to post this piece on "going gray" in response to a public invitation to readers of Me, My Hair and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession. Reader Cordelia Manning sent in this lovely piece and titled it "Let It Be." It's more evidence that our hair is a deeply personal public/private matter that has the power to make us reflect on our entire lives. The wonder is that Cordelia Manning has done it so succinctly here. Thank you!

"I was a much adored child: first grandchild on both sides; first child of my parents; first niece of all my aunts and uncles. I was the one they had all waited for and I was showered with love and attention. Even later, after my siblings and cousins arrived, I was the first and eldest, the special one.

"I like to think all that attention was wonderful, nurturing, but in fact they were all always fussing over me. My hair was too long, short, or thick, my skin was too fair and freckled, my eyebrows too heavy. Then there was the list of things I couldn’t do because they might mar the perfection I clearly didn’t have: running gives you big calf muscles; playing the flute would mis-shape your upper lip; if you ski you could break a bone.

"So, once I started growing up, I just wanted them to let me be.

"I found my way in the words of a song: '’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free, ’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,' and started turning, turning, and am still turning, on my way to coming out right. What has this to do with grey hair? Hairdressers, too, were always fussing. 'You need streaks, you need a perm, let’s thin your hair…' But I have finally found one who says, 'Your grey hair is beautiful just as it is. Let it be.'"

Beauty and fashion guru Ingrid Nilsen raves in her NOVEMBER FAVORITES video about Me, My Hair and I.  Take a look at minute 10! Thanks, Ingrid!

Want to buy the book - an original paperback, published by Algonquin? Try Amazon or your favorite indie. Some of mine are Porter Square Books and Politics and Prose.