STARGAZING IN SOLITUDE

A writer continues to explore life after a terminal diagnosis in her second memoir.

After Frontal Matter: Glue Gone Wild (2018), writer and Appalachian State University professor Samples has returned to the short, potent essays that recount her experience of terminal glioblastoma multiforme, a type of aggressive brain cancer. While her previous book examined the more immediate and physical implications of cancer, Samples now turns to the fallout in her personal life as treatments start to span years. (“You’re saying I might have to do this for 12 more years?” she hilariously asked a doctor trying to give her hopeful life span predictions.) The different anecdotes are set in Boone, North Carolina, and various locations where she traveled with her family. Samples stumbled after her hard-partying sister, Sarah, in Brooklyn and followed her mother, Jenifer, on Alaskan and Caribbean cruises (“Suzanne + Brain Cancer = Jenifer Buys Cruises”). There is a loose chronology covering her return to work, the publication of her first memoir, her move to live with her parents in West Virginia, and finally, the rise of Covid-19, which introduced the rest of the world to the isolation she had known for years. But it’s that very sense of isolation that serves as the real glue holding her narratives together. “It’s funny how everyone is your friend until you get brain cancer,” Samples posts on social media, inadvertently creating comments that end a yearslong friendship. Her attempt at a one-night stand with a younger woman created a volatile relationship that she refused to put above her art. Several friends disappeared, some following her own outbursts. It all reinforced Samples’ sense that she lived alone in a “purgatory,” somewhere between recovered and still terminally ill. (She nails this unsettling sentiment in one of the book’s standout stories featuring a dreamlike support group that takes place “nowhere.”) Samples guides us through perhaps even more troubling, existential territory, but she has yet to lose her caustic, playful wit. Her asides are sharp and laugh-out-loud funny, making her grim purgatory a fascinating, strangely entertaining place to visit.

A follow-up that tackles loneliness and isolation with remarkable candor and biting comedy.