Broken Frontier

Cancer Vixen: A True Story, by Marisa Acocella Marchetto.  Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, Alfred A. Knopf published Marisa Acocella Marchetto's memoir of her confrontation with breast cancer.  Marchetto, cartoonist for the New York Times, Glamour, and The New Yorker, learned she had breast cancer in May 2004, just weeks before her wedding.  Using an energetic and vividly colorful style, Marchetto details her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.  The book is funny, tongue-in-cheek, and stylish.  Marchetto is the wisecracking, self-styled Cancer Vixen, but this novel isn't just a big poke in cancer's eye.  The humor cushions Marchetto's searingly honest portrayal of her pain, anguish, confusion, and uncertainty.  An accomplished cartoonist, she makes every panel special.

Even if I'd never been exposed to graphic novels, Cancer Vixen would have converted me.  If they were all this good, I would be willing to give up prose novels altogether and concentrate exclusively on the graphic ones.  It's hard to know what to say about it that can give it its due.  Read this book!  Read this book!  Read this book!  I want to write that 333 times (333 x 3 = 999 words, or roughly my column length).  Then, when Cancer Vixen goes into its next printing, and Knopf wants a cover or an ad quote, they could say this: "Brokenfrontier.com says, Read this book!"  But I should give you a taste of what's in store for you.

A cancer patient's experience of diagnosis and treatment is typically overwhelming.  The experiences and the recurring memories of them are strangely nonlinear.  Marchetto's love of diagrams, charts, and maps enables her to create images that capture the cognitive dissonance of the cancer experience in ways that are simultaneously hilarious, and wrenching in their accuracy.

For example, when Marchetto chronicles radiation therapy, she centers the story in a single, 2-page jumble of assorted images.  The background is tedious gray, the events almost commonplace, and assorted phrases float in the background.  There is no beginning, middle or end.  There is only repetition, 6 minutes a day, Monday through Friday, for 6 1/2 weeks.  Marchetto gives the 2-page image a cover page.  The instructions read, "Turn page to open door and do it 33 times." 

We still tend to believe that cancer is a disease that afflicts old people.  But suppose you are 43 years old, and you are diagnosed with cancer.  If old age is not the cause, then what is?  Marchetto asks her doctor if breathing the dust that suffused the air in the collapse of the Twin Towers could have caused her cancer.  Her doctor tells her not to go down that road.  "9/11 could be a factor," he says, "but Marisa, do you really want to drive yourself crazy playing that game?"  "You think this is a game?" Marchetto asks.  Like many another young woman in her shoes, she goes home, loads Google, and searches "breast cancer - causes."  "Click!"  And she is instantly overwhelmed with data. 

It turns out the search for causes is a game, of sorts.  On pp. 34-35, Marchetto gives us her version of "The Cancer Guessing Game.  'Round and 'round and 'round you go…how you get it nobody knows!"  The game runs in an endless line of squares circling the game board, each with instructions on how many spaces to move, up or back, when you land on it.  There is no starting point, as Marchetto indicates, "when did it START is another mystery…" You can start anywhere, as each square on the game contains either a woman with a question about causes, a "research head," or a "corporate head." 

I played the game.  I moved through questions on antibiotics, parabens, hormone therapies, and childbirth ("I never had children" -- Move back 3 spaces).  Inevitably, the player gets trapped in an argument between a "corporate head" and a "research head."  The "corporate head" says, "The evidence suggests it does not cause cancer."  The player moves back 12 spaces, to the square where the "research head" says, "It is likely to cause breast cancer."  What does the player do?  She moves up 12 spaces.  And back and forth it goes, the patient's questions canceled out by the contradictory arguments of the corporate and research heads.  Marchetto's game board design distills the confusing futility of the patient's search for causes into a single image, playful, political, and heartbreaking.

There is plenty of sequential storytelling in Cancer Vixen as well, but even then, the images are dynamic, mischievous, and engrossing.  After Marchetto's diagnosis, she succumbs to an afternoon of self-pity and spends it in bed reading a childhood favorite, Mary Poppins.  She realizes with some surprise that the books and the movie are rather different.  "Mary was kind of a bitch!"  Outside her window, Mary Poppins appears.  "Humph!" says Mary. "Kind of a bitch?!"  And next thing Marchetto knows, Mary Poppins is prodding her from the left, saying, "The pity party's over, c'mon get up…Spit-spot!"  And on her right, the Virgin Mary joins in, telling Marchetto, "You'll never conquer anything by lying in bed all day."

Marchetto conquers cancer, and many of her own insecurities in the process.  She also conquers the reader with her warmth and good humor.  The book can be both troubling and hopeful, and long after you forget the details, the vibrant, compelling images will remain. 

In late September 2006, Cancer Vixen was optioned for a movie starring Cate Blanchett.