Today’s memoirists and personal essay writers owe a debt of gratitude to the Prozac Nation author for rewriting an inhibiting rule.
Breast Cancer
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words
Memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel was working on this, her final personal essay, when she passed away on January 7th, 2020 from metastatic breast cancer. In the piece she reveals that as her health was declining, her marriage was unraveling, and that she was still wrestling with new information her mother finally revealed a couple of years […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Dressing for a Wound: How My Body and I Reconciled After a Mastectomy
A personal essay in which Lisa Miller writes about coming to terms with her body, her image, and her personal style following a mastectomy and reconstruction.
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Cancer Takes Away
As she goes through treatment for breast cancer, Anne Boyer considers what being sick has cost her — physically, financially and emotionally — along with the societal and environmental costs of high-priced treatments.
Posted inHighlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
Breast Implants, Beyond Real and Fake
Nell Boeschenstein reflects on the culturally fraught discourse around post-mastectomy reconstruction.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Few Words about Fake Breasts
Nell Boeschenstein, writing almost seven years after her prophylactic mastectomy, examines how breasts — whether real or fake, attached to or removed from their original owner — carry an overabundance of personal and cultural meaning.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
This Is to Mother You: On Caring for a Toxic Parent in Her Greatest Time of Need
When her challenging, cancer-ridden mother suffers a psychotic break, Jane Demuth searches for the wherewithal to help the person who once demanded the most of her.
Posted inNonfiction
This Is to Mother You: On Caring for a Toxic Parent in Her Greatest Time of Need
When her challenging, cancer-ridden mother suffers a psychotic break, Jane Demuth searches for the wherewithal to help the person who once demanded the most of her.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Tig Notaro on Going Topless Onstage, Post-Double Mastectomy
Last week, ‘Tig’, a documentary about stand-up comic Tig Notaro–whose career reached new heights in 2012 after she opened a set by announcing she had breast cancer–debuted on Netflix. In January, at Vulture, Jada Yuan spoke with Notaro about the film, the assorted grave misfortunes from 2012 that are now behind her, her plans for […]
Posted inUncategorized
A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina: It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for […]