All Our Stories Are Uniquely the Same
On Ariel Gore's Rehearsals for Dying, and some quick little links
The problem with cancer memoirs is that they’re solipsistic. The problem with cancer memoirs is that they’re all the same. The problem with cancer memoirs is that they’re written by the living.
I’ve already written a little about Ariel Gore’s entry into the genre, Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer — a memoir of her wife Deena’s diagnosis with, treatment for, and death from metastatic breast cancer, and her own experience as a caregiver — but I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the way she counters these hidebound critiques of the genre.
I have been a fan of Ariel’s work for years, ever since the days of Hip Mama, the “parenting zine with attitude” she launched in the 1990s, as a college project, after becoming a nineteen-year-old single mom. All her work is born out of and nurtured in the working class/DIY/queer/feminist counterculture and fuses the personal and political toward wryly potent ends. Like everything of hers I’ve read, Rehearsals, which came out last week, is very good, shot through with fury and with magic. In my expert opinion as a person who had cancer, it is an accurate depiction of the dark truths of this miserable experience, told from the perspective of a queer, butch-femme couple navigating the brutal absurdity of the medical maze. It doesn’t fuck around.
“This is my story, the Ariel story,” she writes. “But I’m not the one who got breast cancer.” So while it’s her name on the title page, Deena’s coauthorship is undeniable.
Ariel (which I will call her because took a class with her once and thus it seems weird to say “Gore”) envisioned this project as akin to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which she wrote Deena’s story much as Gertrude Stein wrote the autobiography of her lover.
But Deena objected to the working title — “The Autobiography of Deena E. Chafetz — because, writes Ariel, “she wanted it to be clear from the title that we were talking about every person’s breast cancer, not just hers.”
So instead of a duet the book became a polyphonic chorus.
“Deena doesn’t like to be written about in a document she doesn’t have access to,” Ariel writes of her wife in the present tense, so Deena had full access to the working manuscript through a shared file, and signed off on the draft Ariel submitted to her publisher, The Feminist Press, in late 2023. And in 2022, after Deena asked her to more fully integrate the individual experiences of other people into the story, Ariel posted a note to Facebook, asking if anyone in her network with lived experience of cancer (the phrase she settled on after finding terms like patient, survivor, warrior, victim, etc. inadequate) would be interested in answering some questions as part of her research for the book she was writing. I and dozens of others raised our hands, and our voices—along with those of Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Barbara Ehrenreich, and other touchstones of cancer literature—pop up throughout the book to provide context and counterpoint to the Deena-and-Ariel narrative.
“Deena didn’t want to die in this book because she didn’t want to die, but there was no other way this story could end. Not everyone can be a survivor — and none of us indefinitely.”
That’s the epigraph that opens the book. By acknowledging the inevitable endgame of MBC right up front, and by refusing to sugarcoat, bright side, or deny the true progression of disease, Ariel and Deena pull off the trick of telling the story of both the person who survives and the person who does not. By enfolding the stories of so many others the book defies solipsism. And in both these achievements the book proves itself both utterly unique and a testament to the ability of individual stories to connect to the universal as many times over as there are people to tell them. It’s really a remarkable, glowing thing.
Here are a few quick links, all of which lace into my own ongoing if incoherent inner monologue. There is so much to say, and no time to say it right now, so much so that I have been abandoning thoughts and ideas half-formed for weeks. I meant to have the post about Ariel’s book done by its pub date last Tuesday! I’m grateful for these writers, who inspire me to keep trying.
, on the professional pursuit of making sure words mean something., on learning from history that by the time we know to worry, the thing we are worried about has already happened. I turned this piece over and over in my mind all week, in the context of <everything> but specifically what Alicia is talking about above. In another generation or two, the notion that truth could and should be expressed in commonly understood language will be so inconceivable as to be unmourned. It’s already happened. — on the long tail trauma of the pandemic, and the uses of a pallet jack under fascism: “The reverberations from COVID linger still, in ways we refuse to respect and acknowledge for the sake of feeling triumphant.” So, so good, and I don’t just mean the headline. Millicent has an essay in the Sinéad O’Connor book, a response to “Drink Before the War.” We had our first marketing and publicity meeting for the book last week. It’s happening!
And I loved this, this morning from
, on her young years as an Irish dancer — so very resonant with my own childhood in ballet — and the sad, crass co-optation of Irish cultural identity in the United States, something with which, thanks to Sinéad, I am preoccupied of late. The Saturday morning train to class this weekend was crammed with St. Patrick’s Day partiers in full-on kelly green regalia, beads, giant leprechaun hats, you name it. At least they were sober, which is more than I can say for the return home.
I love the title of this essay. It is such a truth. I am touched to be included in this list. Thank you.