Picasso's Woman: A Breast Cancer Story - Hardcover

MacPhee, Rosalind

4.33

9 ratings by Goodreads

9781568361383: Picasso's Woman: A Breast Cancer Story

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568361386 ISBN 13: 9781568361383

Publisher: Kodansha Amer Inc, 1996

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A personal memoir of MacPhee's battle with breast cancer told as a survival "adventure" by the poet, medic, and inveterate hiker. The story chronicles her cancer diagnosis in 1991, the treatment, and how it affected every part of her life including her relationships with her children, husband, and friends. Ultimately, the memoir is a "woman's book" as it celebrates the bonds between MacPhee and her lively group of women friends to whom she turns to help her save her life. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Published in Canada in slightly different form in 1994, this absorbing story of a resourceful and courageous woman learning to live with breast cancer received the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award. A paramedic trained to take control in critical situations, an ocean kayaker accustomed to pushing herself to the limits, and a poet with a gift for self-expression, MacPhee seems better equipped than most women both to face her frightening ordeal and to share the experience with others. What happened to her is unfortunately all too common today, but her account of it is uncommonly good. In 1991 she discovered a lump in her right breast; a biopsy showed the lump to be malignant. A few months later, while still recovering from a mastectomy, she discovered a lump in her left breast, and a lumpectomy was performed. MacPhee writes honestly and powerfully about the impact of cancer on herself, her family--she and her husband have two teenage daughters--and her community of women friends. Friends play an important role in MacPhee's life, and the withdrawal of one of her closest ones during this time is especially difficult for her to accept. Her attitude toward her prosthesis, her ``boob,'' as she derisively calls it, and her eventual discarding of it reveal much about the importance of self-image and the difficulties of coming to terms with a drastically altered body. Indeed, the present work's title expresses the kinship MacPhee feels with one of Picasso's Cubist paintings of a woman with rearranged body parts. An afterword by Kathy LaTour, a breast cancer activist and survivor, reveals that MacPhee has had a recurrence of cancer and is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ``Any Day Above Ground Is a Good One.'' Any book from MacPhee promises equally to be a good one. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

When she was told she had breast cancer, McFee, a Canadian poet, visualized her body as broken and rearranged, like those of the women in Picasso's cubist paintings. Yet, although she is unsparing in the details-the shock of discovery for someone otherwise healthy and vigorous, the surgery, the ensuing treatments-she is also sturdy and determined to savor the life she has. McFee faces her chances forthrightly with her loving and supportive children, husband and friends; and she plunges back into her work as a paramedic, her craft as a poet and her zest for the outdoors. And she can be tender with another woman who is dying of the dreaded disease. She nimbly brings to life her caring doctors and her terrors as well as her faith. Her attitude-that she "was not dying of cancer-I was living with it. I knew there might be challenges ahead. But then, I've always liked adventures"-may give courage to others. (June) ~
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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