Bitch session

When Sandi Wisenberg decided to start a blog, she chose to do it anonymously. And after some consternation and tossing around of names for herself, she settled on one that has, to her surprise, led to numerous interpretations. In her defense, when you call your blog Cancer Bitch, the meaning doesn’t seem up for debate.

“I was talking to someone, and he was wondering if it was cancer-comma-bitch,” she says. “And someone asked my mother, ‘What’s the bitch?’ and my mother said it was cancer. But no, I’m the bitch.”

In fact, on the phone and in her new book The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (University of Iowa Press, $25)—which collects many of her posts into a blog-cum-memoir—Wisenberg doesn’t come across as bitchy. Instead, she has a thoughtful, introspective, writerly presence, as when she writes in her first entry: “It begins with a whiff of criminality: a suspicious place on a routine mammogram. Something fishy.” Wisenberg began the blog shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer in her left breast, in January 2007, and the book collects entries up through June 2008. Because Wisenberg—codirector of Northwestern University’s graduate creative-writing program—chose to create a book from her blog, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch manages to dodge much of the maudlin retrospectivity of crisis or illness memoirs. Instead, the reader gets a sense of the immediate reactions and turbulent emotions experienced by a patient as news and developments filter down from doctors.

Early on, as she wrestles with the idea of reconstructing her left breast after a mastectomy, she tells the doctor she doesn’t want plastic surgery. But by the end of the appointment—and half a paragraph later in the entry—just at the doctor’s suggestion that she meet with a plastic surgeon, Wisenberg “finds [herself] thinking: I would love to have reconstruction.”

“The classic memoir is looking back from a distance, reflecting on what happened,” says Wisenberg, 53. “For me, it was therapeutic, just a place to write down and react and express what was going on as I was going through it.”

Of course, it’s not just Wisenberg going through it all. Many of the entries concern her interaction with others, as they find out about her cancer. In one entry, titled “A Nervous Laugher,” she worries about the appropriate tone to take when telling someone about her mastectomy. She often finds herself chuckling: “I’m getting a part of my body cut off, ha-ha. If the cancer has spread I could die, ha-ha.”

What may be the most difficult part of putting out a book about cancer recovery is that you never know when you’re fully recovered. So while the book ends with Wisenberg receiving a clean bill of health, the symbolic end of the story may just be symbolic.

“I have heard that the kind I have is the easiest to control, but then it’s also more likely to come back,” she says. “I wonder, what if it starts metastasizing when I’m reading for the book? It’ll be kind of dark. But then, I’ll have to write a sequel, The Return of Cancer Bitch.”

Wisenberg recounts her Adventures Wednesday 25 at Women and Children First.

Buy The Adventures of Cancer Bitch on Amazon.com

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