Culture
What Facing Cancer Taught Me About Fear
And then my greatest fear came to pass. In 2021, I learned that after a decade of remission, the leukemia was back. To relapse after that long is extremely rare, and my prognosis was not good. I thought, “I might die this time,” and that felt frightening. But I had done a lot of work to figure out who I was, what I wanted and even how I would do things differently if I got sick again.
During a second bone-marrow transplant, rather than feeling frozen by fear, I invoked a creative practice to defang it. Medication temporarily impaired my vision, so I journaled in voice memos and watercolors. When my husband, Jon, and I had to be apart, we stayed connected through the lullabies he composed for me daily. And when I grew so weak that I needed a walker, I bedazzled every inch of its drab frame with colorful rhinestones. Afterward, instead of pity, Li’l Dazzy and I were met with delight and, incredibly, a passing shout of “Cool walker!”
I survived that transplant, but I will never be considered cured. I’ll be in treatment indefinitely, and it can feel as if the sword of Damocles is hanging over me. But giving fear free rein makes it hard to live. You’re afraid of rebuilding, because what you create may collapse — but then you just exist in wreckage. And the truth is, sometimes fear makes it hard to see when things are good.
When I returned home months after my transplant, I opened my closet and saw something shadowy and rodent-shaped on the floor. I slammed the door and called Jody, who came over to investigate. Afterward, he came downstairs and said I had a serious problem on my hands. I felt seized with panic and asked if I needed to call an exterminator.
“No,” he said. “A shrink.” It wasn’t a mouse; it was a pouch of patchouli.
I began working on my fear of mice in clinician-directed exposure therapy. And it worked. I no longer see mice as harbingers of doom. I understand that they’re a fact of life, in the city or the country. And while I would still prefer to have Jody — whom I call “Angel Man” for all the miraculous ways he comes to my aid — remove the occasional mouse, I don’t feel I need to move out every time I see one. If mice were to return, I could deal with it.
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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