Cancer Is a Bitch

July 7, 2008
Baker, a former columnist for the online magazine Literary Mama
living in Madison, Wis., is busy on her novel—with a protagonist she happens to have diagnosed with breast cancer—when real life intervenes. Shocked by a diagnosis of breast cancer herself, the 45-year-old mother of three begins a yearlong struggle to combat and comprehend the turn her life has taken. Baker and her radiologist husband trek to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Though her cancer has not metastasized and she’s spared chemotherapy and radiation, Baker nevertheless faces the fear that the disease may return. As Baker grapples with the demands of motherhood and marriage, she also begins a relentless search to find the cause of her disease and head off its recurrence in the future—turning to organic foods, whipping up batches of organic face creams in her kitchen and avoiding electromagnetic fields. In this heartfelt memoir, Baker proves to be both humorous (she compares waiting for her follow-up mammogram results to a “call back” for an acting audition) and compassionate, as when a friend is diagnosed with colon cancer.

September 1, 2008
Wannabe author Baker wrote a novel about a woman who develops breast cancer. Shortly thereafter, the 45-year-old Wisconsin wife and mother was diagnosed with DCIS and underwent a lumpectomy. Cutting, crafty, and clearly a woman on a mission, Baker takes us along as her life turns upside down in so many ways. No graphic treatment specifics here, but an honest (and very funny, for the most part) approach to breast cancer. For all patient health collections.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2008
Product of a home torn by paternal abandonment, maternal psychological breakdowns, and a brothers mental instability and suicide, Baker married a radiologist, a button-down collar guy from earnest, puritanical people whose world was clearer and cleaner, less sardonic, more sure than any Id ever known. But their nine moves in the first 12 years of marriage followed her childhoods many upheavals, so having a family and finding and fixing a dilapidated house provided roots and fast-forwarded time, while allowing little opportunity to mull future plans. By 45, she had had cancer, was negotiating an ambivalent marriage, and then her family found her unconscious on the bathroom floor from a boozy mixture of pills and self-pity. Her risk of further invasive cancer is four to five times greater than the average womans, and frequent checkups chop life into three- and six-month increments. She has taken the controversial tamoxifen. Should she have preventive mastectomy? Radiation? The abstract risks concretized into everyday worriesindeed, all everyday aspects of the diseaseare made wrenchingly authentic in Bakers down-to-earth account.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)