[sic]

by Joshua Cody

A searing memoir about devastating illness, creativity, sex and drugs, and thirty-something life in New York. Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. Facing a bone-marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, and the ruthless grasping for life and sensation; the encounter with a strange woman on Canal Street that leads to sex at his apartment; the detailed morphine fantasy complete with a bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. Moving effortlessly between references to Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and facsimiles of his own diaries and hospital notebooks, [sic] is a cross between Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City : a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man's battle against disease and a celebration of art, language, music, and life. 30 black-and-white illustrations

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Music, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, Disability Studies

272 pages, Hardcover

First published October 17, 2011

About the author

Joshua Cody received his bachelor's degree in music composition from Northwestern University and his master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. He is a composer living in New York City.

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

My curiosity piqued by some rave reviews, I picked this up today at Barnes & Noble, succumbing to a fever of retail impulsiveness. I rarely buy books in hardcover. And I even rarerly buy books in hardcover by new authors. But I was swept up in the hoopla. When will I realize that the hoopla should never be trusted?

I didn't get very far in this cancer memoir before I realized that the author is a garden-variety douchebag, unduly proud of his cocaine usage, sexual prowess, and scathing wit. Okay, he's a better-educated douchebag, but you just can't matriculate the douchebag out of a thirtysomething male.

I wanted to perfect the art of being a patient, I read books, took a Kundalini class—a type of yoga centered on breathing, with a heavy meditation component—and practiced, practiced, practiced imagery techniques, relaxation. I even bought some green tea and drank a box of that; I couldn't stand the taste but I kept thinking of an interview with the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch I had read in the Sunday Times magazine, I think, and he was drinking green tea so that helped—nobody's cooler than Jim Jarmusch.

Yeah, maybe if you're a douchebag. Which you are, Joshua Cody. Own your douchebagginess. It's the only thing that truly belongs to you. Now do I want douchebags to get cancer and to have chemo and face mortality? Of course not. They should be transported to Greenland where they can live out full douchebaggy lives snorting coke, hanging out at the Greenland clubs where they play Kid Cudi, and hooking up with orange-skinned sluts. Live and let live, I say.

Joshua Cody was born in Milwaukee but he moved to New York City to study music composition. And in case you forget he moved to New York City, he'll be glad to namedrop every street and neighborhood in town so you understand that it's his city, not yours! It's his New York City! He's only letting the other eight million people live there because he's 'chill' (I hate that douchebaggy word).

Anyway, maybe this thing gets better. Maybe it gets great. But I will never really know because (as far as I got in the book) I am totally uninterested in Joshua Cody. I don't have to like the protagonists of my books, but they have to be interesting. And you, sir, are not.

The hoopla hasn't snookered me this much since The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud—which is (yes) feces. But don't even get me started on that one.

[Vonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting memoir, a unique take on the formatting. What other words would I use to describe it? Refreshing, honest, raw, enlightening, humorous, sad. Ironically, or maybe understandably, some of the primary reasons this was such a good memoir also made it the exact opposite. Cody's long tangents; his random all over the place anecdotes; his musings regarding his parents; his account of his love affairs; the ramblings that vacillated from a coherent, practically academic analysis of his life to the incoherent mutterings of a depressive to the equally incoherent words of a man in psychosis.

For example, one chapter begins to detail his childhood in Germany, getting into the Liszt Academy for Music in Hungary, turning down the chance to attend the Vienna one. Some girlfriend named Valentina that becomes wife at some point. During the war, he is incarcerated by the Hungarian government, Kádár style, as a propoganda ploy. He rips out the eight fake IVs out of his chest, fake blood going everywhere. He is telling his mother that they need to get out of there. Fake nurses grab him. He begins to look back on his age, placing him at 50+ years old.

I was already confused, but it is at this point that I really begin to question what is going on. I suppose that was the goal of the author. Cody was nowhere near that old! As it turns out, with his mother's use of the words "New York", he finally realizes he is in a morphine hallucination.

Great.

This all successfully painted the picture of a man dealing with cancer, chemotherapy that failed to work; a man who was on the verge of death, a man coping with the uncertainty of it all and the impending doom of various factors, but made it out alive.

Unfortunately (again, maybe fortunately), this made it quite confusing to read at times. Other times, downright annoying. He would go on a tangent and then a tangent on that tangent, and this would be fine (this is how I find myself talking to my friends typically), except that I do not know him and therefore his meditations on his family history were of little interest to me. Furthermore, the lack of structure served to diminish the significance of the core of his "survival" story. Then again is that really his story? The problem is he himself does not write as if he knows. On the outset, he seems to want to tell us his story of surviving cancer. As his narration continues, however, it seems to be more a general meditation on his life, a cathartic examination; that it is in this process of writing this memoir that he is figuring out his story.

He calls his psychotic ex girlfriend "Nothereal, rhymes with ethereal", as it is Not Her Real Name, she is the Real Not Her Real Name, as opposed to other characters, namely his love interests, that did not have their real names used. He examines his relationships with several different girls, a few friends, his mother, and his father.

I did like how he integrated real life material into his writing, including diary entries from his mother, grocery lists, a view at his notated planner for appointments, photographs and stock pictures (i.e., places he lived, buildings, Catholic saints, paintings).

My other problem is that I personally found him to be pretentious, in his choice of words and constant grandiloquent references. Being a musician and filmmaker, he of course names The Beatles, Thelonious Monk, Mozart, Bach; he integrates the ending and end credit cards from "The French Connection", alternating between the actual end cards "so and so was never caught" and his life "Nothereal moved back to Europe", and zooms in on the appreciation he had for the vague ending (a final shot is fired, the viewer decides who was behind it and who, if anyone, was in front).

But then he goes on to all sorts of other references all the time, full pages quoting and trying to analyze the poetry and Canons of Ezra Pound, Auden's poetry, multiple references to David Foster Wallace, in particular regarding his suicide. Other authors from Smiley to Sontag to Mailer to Roth, Bellow, Updike, Salinger. The list goes on. There barely goes a page without him mentioning a famous somebody, the pages are filled with quotations. There are even long footnotes. He apparently lives somewhere once owned by "a certain Frederick Pabst". Mathematic equations are drawn. The Divine Proportion in The Arts and Architecture. Catholic Saints. Hindu Gods & Goddesses. Greek Mythology. Operas. Bollywood Actors & Actresses. Painters. "Was Picasso intelligent?", inquires a purposely never named lover of his. The response, according to Cody? Yes, because he was convinced "Everything you can imagine is real." He goes on for a chapter regarding Klee and his concern for whether he had given eroticism the proper weight in his work as a whole. Both the introduction of characters he does not wish to name, but discusses at some length, and the philosophizing discourse with himself regarding multiple topics are examples of why I feel that this memoir was more for him than us. According to him, most of it was a collection of past notebooks. It indeed reads like one. More specifically, it reads like a collage of notes and documentation from his years as a cancer patient; while assembling it, he would insert vaguely related monologues and media that enhanced his tangents.

My favorite part is probably when he finally completely loses it when his " psychotic" ex girlfriend (it was a red flag that she was his a doctor on his pain management team) suddenly ends things with him right before some very important test results are to be given to him and he is therefore convinced that she somehow saw the results, that they were negative, and thus why she is pushing him away. His emotional emptiness, the raw illustration of him letting go finally, giving into his pain, holding a shard millimeters from his neck where the cancer was first discovered, on the edge of a suicide. He admits it was not as dramatic as it seemed, that his close-to-suicide was not really that close. Yet, I felt it. His writing was the reason.

Needless to say, the results were positive. There was no remission, he survived, his ex girlfriend has no reason to randomly end things.

There were a lot of in between tidbits that were fun to read. One example is when his good friend Sophie suddenly walked out of his life, suspecting him to be heroin addict and, in recovery, she could not afford to be friends with him. As she walks out of the hospital room, she encourages him to seek help. He finally realizes, years later, what she found in his apartment. A film prop he had actually spent hours concocting with his friends, experimenting with multiple substances. Good to know they succeeded, anyway.

I respect Cody as a writer. He writes intelligently, although he takes it too far sometimes. His storytelling is engaging. Until it is not. It is fascinating. When I understand what is going on. On page 137, he writes in reference to painter Klee, "... along with my love for his art is my love for what I imagined he was as a person... I realized that my favorite artists are those I imagine would be nice people to know. And that's fucked up. David Foster Wallace wrote that 'watching his scenes I again felt that I admired [the director] as an artist and from a distance but would have no wish to hang out in his trailer or be his friend.'"

That is exactly how I feel about you.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Not for everyone, admittedly.

Fun to look through the other Goodreads reactions to this book. "Overwrought," they say. "Narcissistic," and "douchbaggy" and "pretentious," and I have to say, they're all correct to some extent, but so what? Should we ask that the memoirs we read be careful to please us and make the protagonists likable and not be true to themselves? That's not why I read (the occasional) memoir; usually I'm interested in an experience and worldview different enough from my own to force some perspective on my own life. And this book, I thought, fit that bill. Sure, it is pretentious, but most things that aspire to any kind of high art will be by definition pretentious; usually part of the artistic endeavor is to challenge the status quo, to try to make something new and most likely fail spectacularly, but sometimes to succeed. And this book succeeds.

I found this book exhilarating and remarkably well-written, part high-wire performance piece, part cancer memoir, part document of how a certain type of New York city artist lives. Cody is an artist—a composer and teacher as well as a writer—but more than just some handy labels, the book seems to portray the inner life of an artist. Cody was treated for cancer a few years back. That experience—the failure of his first treatment, and his near-death during the second treatment—forms the backbone of the book. But because it is about pondering the life-almost-lost, he covers a vast host of subjects (music, of course, but also Pound and Eliot, art and architecture, the fallout of his parents' marriage, his dad's final years, food, travel, and various affairs he's had, and on, and on). The through-line is sometimes nearly lost, but usually he manages to find meaningful links between the different things in his head that illuminate the tremulous state of anyone waiting to die prematurely.

There are some breathtakingly vivid moments and lots of interesting thoughts about art and its relation to life. Yes, it's pretentious stuff, but that doesn't mean it isn't great.

[Judith Hannan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like the up and down flow of this book, my reaction went from one star to five. I wanted so much to end up at five because there is something so exhilarating about this book. The writer is clearly and original and often brilliant thinker and his writing is powerful and propelled me along. But by the end, I felt I really didn't know Cody all that well. The book was so far-flung that nothing was developed. There were a lot of fascinating pieces but there was little glue or, if I dare use such an academic word, no thesis, no way to define what the book was about. Still, I would recommend it. It's not a long read and it's worth experiencing how this writer works.

[K. A. O'Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think this book was written for women.

Or maybe it wasn't written for the kind of woman that I happen to be, at the moment. It's well-crafted and enthralling and almost beautiful. But there's this raw, I-had-cancer-but-I-still-got-lots-of-grade-A-tail-all-the-time bravado that I couldn't get used to and wasn't that into.

[Kyla · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up after 2 chapters. Words that came to mind: blowhard, pretentious jerk, unlikable misogynist with suspiciously Penthouse-letter sounding "encounters"...hence the quitting. Life is too short.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked big chunks of [sic], Joshua Cody's highly-stylized portrait of, mostly, the two years or so of his life when he was diagnosed with, and battled against, cancer: his (understandably all-over-the-map) emotional journey; his (gripping and harrowing) medical struggles; his (often amusing) sex-and-drugs adventures as a thirty-something creative-type living in New York City. I also found big chunks of [sic] to be either unnecessarily confusing or just kind of annoying. Cody, who's a classical composer by day, has a looping, high-wire-act writing style, and when he succeeds, when his long sentences keep you in suspense for lines at a time and then end with a lovely or funny or unexpected crescendo [insert proper music analogy here that I'm too lazy to research], he can be almost breathtakingly entertaining. But the performance wears thin in the (short) book's second half, and some of the best moments overall, in fact, are during those rare times that he plays it straight-ish (the description of what a bone-marrow transplant actually entails for the recipient, for instance). And the whole thing's not nearly as erudite, nor as raunchy, as it should have/could have been. Will definitely look for Cody's byline though, and see what he does next.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this through a giveaway held here on Goodreads.

Cody doesn't write about his experience with Cancer in the sort of straightforward way many of us generally expect. Rather, it's more a memoir of thought, senses and perception. There were many parts I found delicious to read(his morphine-induced delirium, for example). I also found myself interacting and connecting with the book a great deal, such as listening to the recordings he mentions, envisioning his view of place I've also been to.

His writing style both works in some places and fails in others. When it failed, it reminded me of my high school stream of consciousness journal writings. You may roll your eyes and feel a little exasperated with him at times. Just the same, I got quite a bit out of this book. It's certainly worth a chance.

[Chavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though there were moments where I felt like I had accidentally ended up in an upscale lounge somewhere where men wear $2000 suits, and drink $1000 bottles of wine and discuss their art collections, and where they invested their fortunes. (In short, privileged and over educated, and unaware of their own narrowness.)

There were pieces of it that were great. Fragments. But the story of illness, I barely saw it. Maybe that's the beauty of it. The story of his illness is the story of life - the ups and downs of it, the people who come in and out of it, the moments where it is glorious and vivid, and the moments it's just heaviness, and there's the thought of ending it.

To explain feelings he uses metaphors or analogies, long, intellectual and fascinating, metaphors that are thoughts complete in themselves and don't necessarily lead back to the feeling. The golden ratio, Citizen Kane, Klee, Ezra Pound - these are where he goes to make sense of things, his language for understanding the self.

These references, and the detours into artists and art and lyrics and girls are, told in this rambling, exploring way -- are captivating, but in the most intense situations, where he is trying to convey something particular, it comes across flat.

My favorite passage, only because it pertains to me:

"But she had to assume this identity as she had to assume her other roles: girlfriend, New Yorker, freelance designer, person walking down the street, person eating breakfast, person engaged in conversation, person giving someone a hug.
None of her actions was in the least inauthentic but her degree of alienation from goals, actions, simple states of being - the acute inescapable self-surveillance of the addict - resembles that rareified ontological space of the depressive, the anxious, the ill, the poet."

That describes me too well. And I would venture, based on his own writing that it describes Cody, to some degree, as well.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

One thing’s for sure: this is not your average cancer memoir. With an in medias res beginning and a stream-of-consciousness style, Cody’s book is to your run-of-the-mill cancer survivor’s story as Formula One racing is to a little old lady’s drive around the corner. His frenetic, drug-fuelled pace (that’s anti-cancer drugs and Class A drugs both) makes for some breathless, breathtaking run-on sentences such as this, as his plane is landing in New York:

you remember the odors and the way diner coffee tastes and splashes and the color of the linoleum on the floor of the bathroom you had when you were four, and you’re coming down and the plane is coming down and the century is coming down and the millennium is coming down and New York is coming down, like Paris came down and Vienna came down and Persepolis came down except the difference is that for New York you’re there to witness it, and that’s the arrogance and the humility of the living.

A later sentence runs to nearly two pages. In betwixt his playful treatment of random topics, Cody pops in equations, anagrams, facsimiled pages from notebooks and scrapbooks, and a number of only vaguely relevant photographs.

To begin with I thought this manically digressive style was delightful, à la Laurence Sterne or David Foster Wallace (clearly one of Cody’s heroes). I was happy to go along with Cody as he discovered the “joy of letting meandering thoughts meander, reasonless, for the sole sake of joy.” But before I’d read a third of the book, I was weary of the anti-narrative devices.

[Juan-Pablo · Rating 4 out of 5]

No-clichés cancer-memoir

My UK edition of this book comes with a Jonathan Franzen’s front-page endorsement, “Writing this rawly self-conscious has no business captivating you, let alone moving you. That it manages to do it anyway is a testament to Mr Cody's talent, honesty and singularity.” Well, considering that Mr Cody published the book, I assume that he has an interest captivating his readers. He manages this partially.

Mr Cody can certainly write. His prose is lively, intelligent, and entertaining. If you can get over what other readers have complained as “pretentiousness” (is he really pretending? I don’t know), you can certainly enjoy this memoir and its many digressions. It is in these deflections, though, that the book succeeds and fails.

This book can be appropriately described as a “no-clichés cancer-memoir”. There is none of the self-pity, new-discovery-of-the-beauty-of-the-world type of subject matter that plagues this genre. Instead we get some poignant streams of consciousness, specially the ones that deal with the “disease-self”. From here the author digresses into his many cultural references (he’s a PhD composition student) and sexual adventures (are they really true? Who cares). On the other hand, when the author pushes his family history into the picture, it becomes less interesting. He can manage a universal metaphor of the ill through art and the body, but not really through his personal history.

[Jessica]

This isn't a memoir. This is a guy's diary. Is it interesting? A little bit. But not as much as the author thinks it is. And it reveals the author to be more misogynistic and privileged than he probably even is in real life. There is no invitation to the reader here. There is a big sign on the door that says, "Stay away." Cody thinks that being clever will save him from the hard work of figuring out 1) what a memoir is and 2) how to write one. But it doesn't. Cody is so busy reading Pound and David Foster Wallace (his ultimate writer bro) that he seems to have forgotten to actually read some books in the genre in which he is writing. Perhaps this is because the best ones are often written by women? After all, one glimpse at the simple yet powerful prose in Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," for example, could have told him that all the fancy sentences in the world won't save you if you have no growth, no relatable characters, no payoff, no journey. A memoir is the act of giving someone an experience. I want to experience Cody's life, want to experience what he experienced from his perspective. But he won't let me. He's too busy being smart. So instead of an experience, what I have is something I could have gleaned from his author's bio: Joshua Cody is smart. But after a few hundred pages (I forced my way through to the end), I have no idea who this person is or why I should care.

[Susanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hmm. I'm not sure what I think of this book. The beginning of the book was fairly gripping, as an examination of what it is like to be a somewhat iconoclastic cancer memoirist, someone who is writing the book *about* cancer diagnosis and treatment, but to whom the cancer diagnosis is just one part of his life, rather than what the book is *about.* The topics Cody covers are wide-ranging, pretty intellectual while at times almost smutty as well -- the memoir is an examination of love in the light of illness, suffering, and death. Some of the themes resonated a great deal with me -- obsession with an artist (in his case, Ezra Pound), love of Paul Klee, being an artist coming from a Midwestern background. The narrator is not especially likable to me; he comes across as intelligent but also arrogant ("of all the strippers I've been with ..."). And somewhere after the midpoint, I lost interest. The narrative became so stream of consciousness, and so deeply involved with the author's internal musings about fairly arcane subjects, that I was wishing it would end. I am glad I read all the way through, as the ending did bring some threads together in a way I appreciated, and some of his observations really shine, so it was worthwhile, but it didn't meet the expectations I had for it, quite.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

My friend Josh has written something extraordinary. Probably not for everyone, but more than once, in fact a lot more than once, he got me. The 'Sister Morphine' chapter alone demonstrates an understanding of tone and structure that few writers have achieved. Yes, the book is a memoir about surviving cancer treatment (that phrase is on purpose - it's not just about surviving the disease itself), but more to the point, as he described the book to me, it's sex drugs & rock 'n' roll. Plus an Ezra Pound obsession.

[David Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastically funny account of a decidedly unfunny experience. The narration is delightfully tangential, though a bit heavy on the Elliot and Pound references (tempered lovely by mentions of Indiana Jones). Mr. Cody folds intelligence into his writing without succumbing to pretension (unless, of course, you have a phobia of academics, in which one would see pretension in everything). The title itself is the greatest ever; superbly nerdy.

Book received for free through Goodreads First Reads program.

[John Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A harrowing story of unexpected illness and subsequent complications, Cody (interestingly, descendent of Buffalo Bill Cody) relates his experience with urgency and candor. He cites David Foster Wallace as a favorite author and that influence on his writing bugged me in the same way some of Wallace's writing bugged me. I think between films of Paul Thomas Anderson and writing of David Foster Wallace my general reaction has been 'Fantastic, but maybe indulge a little less?' I had that same reaction here.

[Richard Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refreshingly different, [sic] is exuberant, even manic, while dry-eyed about Cody's plight in a bout with cancer. A possible cost of Cody’s approach is that I always felt distanced from him. How much “knowing” and liking a memoirist matters to you is intensely personal, but partly because of this, at times reading [sic] my mind wandered. Cody’s memoir showcases not only the rewards but the risks of a flamboyant persona.

[Melissa Boyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like most great art, this work is layered and multi-faceted and stays with you long after you've walked away from it. Cody is honest about who he is and doesn't dull anything for the sake of a broader audience appeal- he is clearly a classically trained musician and classically educated thinker, therefore his work is the product of such a mind. My only reservation is that this work is so intimate that I feel I know him and that we should have coffee and I can't shake that.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was looking forward to a memoir of a cancer survivor and what I got was continuous rankings of art and music. Not what I expected. I struggled to get half way through but then he finally got into his experiences. It was better than the beginning but just not what I was expecting. Maybe that's my fault, but I was generally underwhelmed.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fellow survivor, I was excited to read a cancer memoir that didn't come off like a melodramatic made-for-TV movie. This was brilliant, beautiful, hilarious and heartbreaking. It was super real and very scattered at times, which wasn't annoying or distracting, it's just the way thoughts can go when you're navigating the world of cancer. Loved this book.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overly intellectual and completely heartbreaking. I could forgive the former in light of the latter. Doesn't hurt my perception of the book to be watching a friend die of cancer while reading this. Doesn't hurt my perception of the author that he regularly comes back to David Foster Wallace. I had no choice but to fall into some kind of deep appreciation/affection for this entire effort.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, Cody is a fine writer with an eye for form and detail. His personal memoir of his struggle through chemo, more chemo, radiation and a bone marrow transplant is both particular and very universal. His willingness to reveal himself at his neediest and most deluded adds much to this brief but moving book, which encompasses reflections on art, relationships, his family, and more.

[Clio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a butterfly flitting from the depths of despair to the heights of artistic realisation. An inspiring book. A grounded book. Very real. Should have had the last chapter edited out it added nothing and rambled. This is not the sort of book that needed loose ends tidying up. It's beauty was it's seeming disorganisation and organic growth.

[Gemma Fish · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, well written and often times very funny memoir. I loved it and couldn't put it down. Joshua Cody often speaks the truth about the human condition in a blunt way that a lot of writers would shy away from. To say I loved it is a massive understatement. It's one of those books that I'm truly sad to have finished.

[Skrot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like adjectives. A lot. So I will toss out a few in lieu of an intelligent review of this book: moving, funny, devastating, intelligent, honest, sad, life-affirming, musical (referring to the prose styling and the effective repetition of images/phrases), awesome.

[Ashley Godfrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this book up from the corner shop for $2 and I LOVED IT! Best book I've read in a loooong time... If I had one thing to criticize, it would be the excessive sexual scenes... JOSHUA YOUR BOOK IS BEAUTIFUL, YOU DON'T NEED TO FILL IT WITH SEX OK?

[Greg Voynow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminds me of a darker, more fantastic, intelligent and hallucinatory version of jay mcinerney's bright lights big city.

[Mia Kim-solloway · Rating 2 out of 5]

Soulless, pretentious, windbaggery.

[N.j. Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big smart impressions from a man who survived, saw him live in Melbourne. V funny. I'll look forward to his next book.

[Molly Baines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn't what I was expected but still a great read- Cody talks about not only what cancer does to your body, but how it can really affect your mind.