Diary of a Detour: (Writing Matters!)

Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the dramas and delving into the science. Stern also nudges cancer off center stage by turning to alternative obsessions and pleasures. In seductive writing she describes her life in the garden and kitchen, the hospital and the library, and her travels-down the street to her meditation center, across the border to Mexico, and across the world to Australia. Her immediate world is inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales, lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix 1. Chickens Saved My Life  1 2. The Time It Takes (By Way of an Introduction)  3 3. Secret  7 4. A Possum Fate (Averted)  9 5. Events Unfold in the Snow  12 6. Chicken Feet  17 7. Why Chickens or Homage to Gloria  18 8. Boomerang  22 9. A Way of Making Another Egg  25 10. Shivers and Shakes  28 11. The Chicken or the Egg  32 12. Strawberry/Fetish  34 13. Life after Life  40 14. The Poetry of Pigs  44 15. Some Musings on Metaphor  45 16. Tricking the Body  51 17. Chicken Joke  53 18. Nice Paint Job  57 19. Frenzied Calm  59 20. Tokhm-e Morgh  73 21. Disability  74 22. Why Me, Lord?  75 23. Five Down, Two to Go  80 24. The Warrior Song of King Gesar  81 25. Euphoria  85 26. A Fern Romance  87 27. Weeding  89 28. Untimely  92 29. Blue/Shimmer  93 30. Missed Connection  109 31. Blown through the Air  111 32. Don't Think about It (For the Moment)  114 33. Spheres of Glass  115 34. Purple Haze  123 35. Cantankerous Rooster  125 36. Dead and Alive: A Tenuous Continuum  128 37. Breakfast Anecdotes  138 38. Landscape  139 39. Tootin Pootin  143 40. Dragon Inn  150 41. All along the Highway  153 42. A Lion's Roar  156 43. The Ecology of Cancer, and What Do Ants Have to Do with It?  158 44. What Does It Matter?  164 45. So Unctuous and So Tender  166 46. Dorland  169 47. Touched by a Whale  174 48. Travel  181 49. The Answer Is Not Coming  182 50. Night Club Bouncers  184 51. All Natural  187 52. Anza Borrego  190 53. Lighten Up  197 54. Glad to Be Here (Plaintive Knowledge)  203 55. Stinging Nettles  205 56. A Talent for Cancer  212 57. Phobia: The Chickens Come Home to Roost  214 58. Walking Meditation  219 59. A Ticket for Tuppence  221 60. Reaching Yirrkala  226 61. Chookless  245 62. Chicken Shit  246 63. Mimetic Pain  250 64. You Are Mostly Not You  254 65. R.I.P. Elvis, the King of the Cats  260 66. Afterlife  263 67. Art Alive  268 68. Bodies in Pieces  271 69. A Prospect of Consolation  275 70. Fig Future  278 71. Between Fresh and Rotten  280 72. Blood Poetry  294 73. Shimmer and Glimmer  295 74. I Need an Advocate  297 75. Nameless  302 76. Fermentation Dreams  306 77. The Structure That a Life Has  309 78. Like a Cat in a Hat, Sleek and Brave: R.I.P. Ryoko  311 79. The Malvolio Gene  314 80. What Do You Expect?  318 81. Chimera  320 82. The Last Chicken Standing  335 83. Arrivderci  338 Notes  343

About the Author :
Lesley Stern is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego; author of Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing, The Smoking Book, and The Scorsese Connection; and coeditor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance.

Review :
“Diary of a Detour is such a great book, excessive like Lesley Stern's own intense appetite for life that includes her wide knowledge about the intricacies of disease. It's the most pleasurable cancer book imaginable. I was riveted, the specificity of the writing is a drug. Stern has written a wonderful, stirring, magnificent book. Oh, World, you are the love object of this hardworking, self-deprecating extravagant genius.” - Eileen Myles, author of (Evolution) “Diary of a Detour is wonderful on so many levels. Besides being an extraordinary writer, Lesley Stern is emotionally and intellectually sophisticated in such subtle and deep ways. She outlines the stakes of learning to live and feel in the grip of inescapable finitude and mortality, together with others of many kinds and species, but also alone, as irreducibly this vulnerable person and no other. I love this book.” - Donna J. Haraway, author of (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) "What emerges most powerfully is Stern’s determination to live-not just to stay alive but, as Tennyson writes in 'Ulysses,' 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' . . . A mixture of the mundane and the medical, the ordinary and the extraordinary." (Kirkus Reviews) "[Stern's] final book, the magnificent Diary of a Detour (2020) that appeared just before her passing, records how the force of obsession – obsessions with planting and tending, with chickens, with the growing and preparing of food, with the cycles of nature – literally prolonged her life, pulling her through into new and brilliant investigations, and an ever-widening collaboration with activists at all levels of the environmental movement." - Adrian Martin (ArtsHub)