Keeping it Real

Less drama, please

I went to see She Said this weekend – the film adaptation of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about the reporting odyssey that led to the publication of their 2017 investigative bombshell detailing Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment and assault of women in his orbit. It’s a big-budget, prestige Hollywood film, total Oscar bait, whose abysmal box office performance has been the subject of some head-scratching debate.

Now, I am a sucker for this particular genre. Intrepid reporters hot on the trail of a story that would bring down the Catholic church? The defense department? The presidency? Sign me up. And I was on board with this one, even if it hews kind of ploddingly to Kantor and Twohey’s book. And then, at the eleventh hour, as the team at the Times huddle around a desk fine tuning the lede, checking every fact, and staying out of the way of Patricia Clarkson’s statement necklaces, a key source calls to say she’s decided to go on the record. It’s the right thing to do, she says, wearing a hospital gown, and she’s decided to wait until this moment, right before she’s wheeled in for a double mastectomy, to take the plunge. 

If I had been holding popcorn I would have thrown it in the air. 

It’s true that modern-day reporting can suffer from a lack of cinematic drama. There’s no flower pot on Bob Woodward’s balcony, no Daniel Ellsberg stealing documents from the RAND corporation. Instead, She Said offers shot upon shot of Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan striding down the street talking on their iPhones. Or huddling in a corner of the New York Times cafeteria talking on their iPhones. Or waking up in bed with their husbands to take a call on their iPhones. The real last-minute source, Laura Madden, did have breast cancer, but she went on the record five days before surgery, not five minutes. But I guess that was not dramatic enough, so they had to punch it up.

As the character (played by Lizzie Bennett herself, the fantastic Jennifer Ehle) is wheeled down a hallway to surgery, tears pooling on her cheeks, I leaned over to my friend to note that it begs credulity to imagine someone making a decision like this right before major surgery, and that in reality she would be so full of pre-anesthesia meds at that point in the process that she wouldn’t care about a damn thing.

All of this is a long windup to the point: cancer is everything, everywhere, all at once, and yet still so misrepresented and -understood. I mean, movies are going to movie, but c’mon – if one in every eight women will get breast cancer in their lifetime, surely there was someone on set who might point out how ludicrous this scene was?

Out in the real world, to draw on another recent conversation, if you know someone who has had a bilateral mastectomy, do you know that they may never again have sensation in their nipples? That, actually, in all likelihood they don’t have any nipples? That even if they’ve had reconstruction – if they still have a “mound” –  they may have a linear gash across their chest from armpit to armpit for the rest of their life? Or do you think everything is tidy and pretty down there under their blouse?

If you’re not in the breast cancer community (or the trans community, or the Venn diagram thereof) you probably don’t think about mastectomies at all, and that is actually totally fine. Why would you? To the ill person, their rebellious body is an urgent mystery to be solved, with the highest possible stakes. It’s very dramatic all on its own! But to outsiders, hearing us go on about ports and chemo protocols and the benefits of Cerave vs. Aquaphor for radiation burns is boringly incomprehensible, like when someone starts talking to me about crypto. Sometimes, when people ask how I’m doing, I miscalibrate their degree of interest, or their fluency in the lingo, and see them start to fidget if I get too deep into the weeds of seromas and fluid aspiration. I don’t blame them! It’s gross! 

Finding that balance is something I struggle with in writing about it all – how much is too much? How little is too vague? Who’s my audience here? There were only four other people in the screening of She Said, but I didn’t see anyone else flinch at this cancer boner on screen. It’s a subculture, this world of cancer patients, with their own obsessions and lingo. My reaction to this quite minor movie moment is akin to that of an intolerable record store clerk well actually-ing the sight of Fugazi’s first album in a film set in 1986.

Looking back on the early days of this newsletter, I hear a certainty of voice that is harder for me to find lately, I think in part because I don’t want to be that record clerk. I’m at that point in the exploration of this subculture where I now know just how much I don’t know. I’m afraid of sounding dumb, of getting bogged down in minutia, or of sounding too peppy and pat. Instead, I find myself retreating into corners where I’m sure of the crowd, where I don’t have to worry about explaining too much — such as the Recovery on Water holiday potluck, which was the most affirming social outing of recent memory. I pretty much stopped rowing when the chemo got bad in September and then, duh, I broke my ankle and I couldn’t do anything. It was such a relief to be back in that space, on two good feet, and eating everything in sight.

And I’m seeking out media that may only be comprehensible to others in the club. I’ve been subscribing to more cancer-related Substacks, like Gina Jacobson’s Strive For Five and Cameron Scott Steele’s interruptions. I’ve found comfort there, reading the stories of women so different from me in many ways, but who are both speaking my language. I bought a self-published collection of essays by a writer named Christy Lorio, whose frank unapologetic voice is wonderfully bracing. I only learned of her after she died last month. I’ve gone back to a wonderful collection of poems by Amanda Moore, the sister of one of my nurses, who herself had breast cancer. I feel so unqualified to say anything about poetry, but this book, Requeening, contains so much beauty. I even spent an afternoon going down the rabbit hole of  #cancer TikTok, which was too much.

This quest for common ground is how I wound up on the phone yesterday with a woman I have yet to meet in person but with whom I share an acquaintance and, it turns out by some fluke, a surgical team. She was going in for a bilateral mastectomy this week and wanted just to talk to someone who’d been, well, not exactly there clinically speaking but had been through the process of chemo, surgery, and recovery in the same hospital, with the same doctors. And while of course in meeting someone, just as in writing, there’s that tentative question of audience – How much to share? How much do they know? – within minutes were were laughing about our terrible digestive problems and comparing notes on just when our pubic hair might grow back. It was hilarious and terrible and perfect. Because she and I? We had our facts straight and we weren’t punching up for drama. There’s been plenty of it already and we both would be happy with a little less.