Kirkus Reviews QR Code
CANCER AND FISHNET STOCKINGS by Maryann  Grau

CANCER AND FISHNET STOCKINGS

by Maryann Grau

Pub Date: March 7th, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73359-090-7
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media

In this debut memoir, a fight with pancreatic cancer prompts the author to reflect on life, meditate on mortality, and enumerate the pleasures of company and food.

From the beginning, Grau promises to lighten the account of her cancer battle with a hefty dose of humor. “Laughter over tears,” she writes, “because without the ability to laugh, the urge to surrender would be too strong.” After the tumor was discovered and as the treatment began, she sent cheeky email updates to the members of her community center in Cambria, California, where she taught dance aerobics and weight training. The author sprinkles these emails throughout the book, and though they often take the shortest route to easy gallows humor, it’s enjoyable to read these lively and irreverent missives. Grau sometimes resorts to platitudes like “Hadn’t I heard somewhere that laughter is the best medicine?,” which can derail otherwise well-paced sections. Not all attempts at comedy land, but the depiction of an overenthusiastic local surgeon is as funny as it is unsettling. In another creatively rendered and well-executed passage, the author uses the tasting notes of wine to describe the flavor of her drug regimen. Other parts speak to paranoia and mortality, as when Grau begins connecting various scrapes with death into a single narrative of survival. The author calls herself a “toughie,” her dad’s phrase, and suggests her surviving cancer isn’t unrelated to her growing up in the South Bronx. Grau’s attempts at humor do lighten the mood of the work, even if they fail to distinguish it much from other accounts of cancer battles. But the book doesn’t really aim to break new ground, and though it delivers familiar truisms about cherishing loved ones, savoring the good times, and being grateful for life, it owns up to its treacly spirit. A truism might not be new or interesting—but at least it’s true, and at most a source of comfort to someone who wants it.

An animated story of survival and an exuberant display of how to live well.