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Gina Frangello’s texts are legend. Ask her a question and she may well send you a novella in reply — or that’s what she did when I told her I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer last spring. Smart, exuberant, discursive, compassionate — her gift for correspondence is a manifestation of her searching mind and generosity of spirit, qualities that have remained constant over the at-times tumultuous twenty-plus years we’ve been friends.
The author of four books of fiction and currently a lead editor at Row House Publishing, Gina broke big in 2021 with the publication of her fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint). A chronicle of the “crucible year” (and then some) during which she exploded her carefully built life as a wife and mother for the sake of a soul-shaking affair with the man who would become her second husband, it was on seemingly every “Best of” list of the year and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, among its many accolades. (It’s a great book. You should read it!)
During this period, she was also diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy and chemotherapy — all of which happened almost, as she puts it below, “in the background” of the drama of the rest of her life. I wanted to talk to her about this, both the experience and the process of writing through it, and about how the intervening seven years (during which she has remained cancer free) have colored her interpretation of this cataclysmic period of her life. And, lucky me, she agreed — even though she’s in the middle of organizing the first-ever Bombay Beach Literary Festival on top of her usual cornucopia of commitments. I sent her a bunch of questions and have only very lightly edited her characteristically frank, incisive thoughts on breast cancer and sexual agency, unreliable narrators, the complicated baggage of the term “cancer free,” and so much more.
Hi, and thanks again for doing this! With these interviews I'm trying to listen to other people's experience of being diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer and also trying to recognize the totality of the person's personhood, because no one wants cancer to be their full-time job or identity.
But, inevitably, these stories always start with the moment of discovery and diagnosis. So, perhaps we should start there and get it out of the way. I was around for much of this but, for those who weren't, how did you discover you had breast cancer and what was your initial response, both emotionally and externally? Did you tell the world, kick into problem solving/research mode, try to minimize it, freak out and hide under the bed?
I was diagnosed with breast cancer at an incredibly complex time in my life, which I suspect is a familiar experience given that you were just about to get married when you had your diagnosis. In my case, my father who had lived in my home for 16 years had just died, and I was going through a divorce that had started amicably enough but had recently taken a highly contentious turn. I was also only marginally employed, parenting three kids who had just had their parents split up, with both parents in new relationships, and whose grandfather died in our home, plus my relationship (with the man who is now my husband, Rob Roberge) was long distance and he lived 2000 miles away in California.
Rob actually discovered my lump during one of his visits to Chicago. He, understandably, wanted to believe it was nothing, but--I don't know how to explain this--although I'd had a lump previously that needed to be biopsied but turned out to be nothing, the very second we discovered the lump this time round, I just knew. I had been under enormous stress and had taken to making gallows humor jokes to my best friend that I had a tumor. I was losing a lot of weight and had no appetite and was dizzy a lot, and she kept telling me it was the stress, which was an extremely reasonable explanation given that I was absolutely under a lot of stress. But in that way you just sometimes know your own body, I knew that wasn't it. I felt a way I had never previously felt. I wanted to chalk it up to that I had never had a dead father or gotten divorced or lived part-time away from my children before either, so that could be why things felt so "different," but from the time Rob felt the lump, I had an immediate sense of: Oh, this is what it's been.
I made medical appointments very quickly, and on the Thanksgiving weekend when no one was in the office but a technician, I called to check on the results--on so-called Black Friday--and managed to somehow coerce the technician into looking at my chart and confirming for me that the lump was indeed cancer. At first, I had almost no reaction. I was numb, because he was just confirming something I already knew. If I hadn't known prior to my medical appointments, I'd have known when the doctor and nurse who ultrasounded my breast immediately did a biopsy right there on the spot and seemed to be exchanging looks over my head. But the day I got the news, I had a bunch of people in my house and a turkey in the oven and I just went downstairs and went about the day like nothing had happened. My first reaction was very much that I didn't want to upset my kids or make the day awkward for my guests. I've returned to that reaction many times since then, parsing it out, and what that said about how I'd been living my life up to that point, my socialization, the things I'd internalized.
The initial total numbness didn't last super long, but there is a sense of being on autopilot as you start being shuttled around through new doctors and tests and surgeons and second opinions. I had my bilateral mastectomy on January 8, 2016, so there was not a lot of time between diagnosis and the surgery looking back. Let me tell you, though, at that time, it felt like I was waiting for a year and a half, and the waiting--for the surgery, for the pathology report--was the hardest time for me. I had three minor children and my elderly and disabled mother lived in my house, and (while absolutely going a bit nuts on the research because I'm hyper-analytical to perhaps a fault by nature) my absolute priority was to just Get It Out. That waiting period is, for someone who is Type A, a unique kind of hell.
I think the more useful information is how to help women retain sexual agency and not feel like their body has become a thing they need to "explain" to people or experience through the lens of other people's reactions.
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