The Bottom Line
Breast cancer isn't funny, but this book is terrifically funny! If you're in treatment, or know someone who is, get this book. Take it along to your next doctor's visit, and read it in the waiting room. You will be the envy of all the other patients, because you will be laughing out loud!
Pros
- Funny, sad, irreverent and honest
- Engelberg says everything I wish I had said during treatment
- Find out the truth about how surgeons really put those bandages on after breast surgery
- The only book you will read that uses the phrase "Tamoxifen Daiquiri"
Cons
- In some drawings, it's hard to tell Miriam from the other bald people
Description
- Insistently funny.
- Consistently honest.
- A true page-turner!
- Very hard to put down.
- Don't loan this book out. You will never get it back!
- Still funny after the third reading.
Guide Review - Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person
Dark humor and pop culture intertwine in this graphic novel about life with breast cancer. "Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person" is Miriam Engleberg's memoir in comics, which she started when she was 43 years old, and was diagnosed with breast cancer.Every aspect of life comes under Miriam's mighty pen: family, friends, work, wigs, sex, nausea, and popular TV shows! Have you ever wanted to know what not to say to a friend with cancer? Miriam covers all the bases of talking about breast cancer, whether by email, phone, or in person.
She also goes after life's Big Issues: Stress, Hangnails, Spirituality, Death, and Crossword Puzzles. Her coping mechanism, creating comics about her life as a patient, keeps you reading, laughing, crying, and thinking about how we all react when we get unwanted health news. Although she says that she was made a "shallower person" by having breast cancer, I think that it takes guts to draw and write a comic memoir that is this honest. Miriam doesn't pull any cheap shots - she just keeps writing it all down, in her Roz Chast-like style, real comics for real people, many of whom will recognize themselves in this book.
Read a sample chapter from this book on the Harper Collins website.
