Milkshakes and Morphine: A Mother's Handbook for Love and Life

by Genevieve Fox

Honest, heartrending and full of humour, this is an extraordinary memoir about an unconventional childhood and the absurdities of the cancer experience. It is also, most importantly, a celebration of life.

When Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her throat, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock. I can’t have cancer, she thinks. I’ve done my hair. But there is another reason she can’t countenance cancer. She was orphaned by it at the age of nine.

Fox’s story weaves together past and present as she recalls her rackety, unconventional childhood, while also facing the spectre of being lost to her young boys. Yet she confronts her treatment with the same sassy survival instinct that characterised her childhood misadventures. She takes life’s precariousness and turns it on its head.

‘Life-enhancing… Original and wonderful’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Exquisite and tender’
SARAH PERRY

Genres: Nonfiction

ebook

Published January 25, 2018

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting memoir about dealing with cancer but felt got more bogged down about her childhood lost of her mother

[Hannah W · Rating 2 out of 5]

The awkward thing about reading memoirs is that, if you don't enjoy them, it can feel like you're insulting the person and/or the experiences they have been open enough to write about. But this book, urgh. I picked it up on a whim in the library, drawn in by the praise on the cover and the premise of a sort of two-memoirs-in-one, for this is a dual telling of Genevieve's unusual childhood in the 1970s (she was an orphan, sent to boarding school and passed around various relatives and hired nannies) and her recent experience of head and neck cancer. I found the latter subject's chapters much more interesting and better written (though sometimes repetitive towards the end, and without much/any acknowledgement of how her class and wealth made her cancer experience different from that of many people), in fact if it hadn't been for them I would have put the book down. The chapters about Genevieve's past made me feel like I was stuck with a boring egotistical person at a party, desperate to relieve their experiences through re-telling but not caring at all if they were well-presented to the audience (with a big slice of name-dropping). Towards the end I skipped chunks of these bits because they were just so dull. A disappointing read that I'll be relieved to return to the library!

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bruising and honest tale of having the big C. The parts about treatment were extremely poignant and beautifully crafted. However the flights of fantasy into the childhood of the writer, were a little tedious for me. An excellent 4-star read nonetheless.

[F S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was ‘enjoying’ it to begin with, but it just went on telling the same story and I got bored. There was a lot of name dropping and many of the childhood reminiscences were very familiar, but I got the point and the repetition of the same theme became dull. The cancer experience was enlightening in parts.

[Karen Waloschek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The name dropping spoilt what could have been a great read.

[Willow · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixture of memoir about cancer and being an orphan child

[Michele]

Reviewed in London Times

[Rebecca]

I read the first 27 pages. Fox has some amusing turns of phrase when talking about her throat cancer and treatment (“Whatever this is that has moved in is bigger than a pea, smaller than a Malteser, and as firm” and “He produces a needle big enough to pierce a donkey’s hide”), but this is way too long. Over 370 pages of awfully small type, about someone I’ve never heard of? Nah. Too much about her Anglo-American upbringing in the 1960s and 70s in the early chapters, too.