I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.
I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.
In a way, the cancer became an ally because it stopped me from running around so much. I was able to settle down and write things I hadn't had a chance to before.
The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.
I read Eve Ensler and thought it was fabulous. Not only that, but it was really the only thing I could relate to about cancer.
So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.
The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.
