Elizabeth Benedict's Blog - Posts Tagged "elizabeth-benedict"
Sunday 4/21 in Westport
Join me this Sunday April 21 at 2pm at the Westport Public Library, talking about mothers, gifts, and what they gave us. My new anthology, WHAT MY MOTHER GAVE ME, with essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Caroline Leavitt, Rita Dove, Elinor Lipman, Emma Straub, Elissa Schappell and many more women, is on the Extended Indie Bestseller List! The event is co-sponsored by the Barnard Alumnae Club of CT!
BOSTON GLOBE LOVES REWRITING ILLNSES!
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.
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.”
Advertisement
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.
