Cancer Vixen

Marisa Marchetto

Rule number one when telling a story: the protagonist must change. And we're not talking about shoes.

Cancer Vixen is chick lit in graphic novel form. Which would already be a horrifying concept were this not a memoir. Putting aside the entire "how much of any given memoir is real?" debate and assuming the reality of the whole experience here, that actually manages to make this scarier. You don't think-- you can't really conceive of-- people with Marisa Acocella's life existing outside the pages of chick lit. (Can you? Without wanting to kill them, I mean.) As the book opens, Marisa Acocella is about as deep as your average mudpuddle. Then the doctors discover she's got breast cancer. At which point, she looks back at her life and realizes she's as shallow as your average mudpuddle.

She then proceeds to studiously avoid changing in any way, shape, or form. At least, that we can see. And there's the rub-- it's entirely possible that Marisa Acocella (Marchetto, after her rather fairytale marriage) did a one-eighty as a person during the time period covered in this book. But we don't see it, which makes the book's final scene-- which is engineered for the purpose of showing us how much our protagonist has changed-- ring as hollow as the bells of St. Mary's. (Yes, all of them. Combined.)

The end result of all this lack of change is that the book ends up reading like a how-to handbook for those who have cancer, a What to Expect When You're Expecting when what's growing inside you is a neoplasm instead of an embryo. Which, I'm sure, is valuable to someone. If it's written interestingly.

Which this book is not. It's riddled with cliches. There's no real variance in tone (as Bookslut pointed out back in October, "The book reads at the same level the whole way through"), there's no sense of pace, no feeling of depth to any of the characters, nothing. Which just adds to my ammo belt when it comes to the whole not-changing thing; for a book written after Marchetto's treatments, it certainly reads like a chick-lit tome on shoe shopping. And in a current climate where cancer memoirs have the marketplace all but saturated, picking at random is likely to land you a better choice than this.