THE LIGHT IN RITA PEARL

A young woman’s cancer memoir.

“I thought I had my life figured out and one day, it all changed within minutes,” writes Arreola at the beginning of her new memoir. “At the age of thirty-five, I was diagnosed with Triple Negative Breast Cancer.” As readers might expect, this revelation provoked a whirlwind of emotional responses in Arreola, and those responses were immensely complicated by the fact that her cancer treatments began just as Covid-19 was shutting down the country and the world. Likewise, the nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder looked like they might cause her unintended problems. If crowds of protesters are blocking the roads, she wonders at one point, how will she get to her chemo appointments? As her treatment commenced, she was only intermittently aware of the big news stories convulsing America (“My only focus is dragging myself out of bed and recovering from chemo”). Her account of her experiences with what turns out to be an aggressive, fast-moving kind of cancer is direct and vivid, and many of the accompanying aspects of the illness—the endless appointments, the moments of unexpected kindness or hope, the ordeal of chemotherapy—will be immediately identifiable to readers who’ve gone through similar experiences. Arreola combines this main illness narrative with the slowly unfolding story of discovering the love of her life and of caring for her son, Carlos, but the book’s most visceral impact is certainly its story of cancer survival. Arreola recounts all the trauma of the struggle—facing the horror of a double mastectomy, dealing with the seemingly endless medical bureaucracy, worrying about the strain on friends and family, and so on—with an affecting style of simple, straightforward prose and honest emotion. Readers who’ve dealt with serious illness will be gripped by the sheer amount of immensely human detail in Arreola’s story.

A blunt, ultimately encouraging story of weathering a medical and logistical nightmare.