About the Book
"Fascinating, a page-turner and a delight" Emma Donoghue
"Revealing, surprising, compelling" Miriam Margolyes, actress
"Genuinely original" Antonia Fraser
"Terrific insight . . . Todd's sound and generous reimagining of women's lives is a splendid work" Publishers Weekly (Starred)
- Only work on radiation therapy and older women living post-radiation from renowned writer and former Cambridge President, written as memoir and diary, about a month in "hospital land" and in radiation machines, during author's third pelvic cancer.
- Reflects on writers Todd read, taught or met: Tennyson, Jane Austen, Wollstonecraft, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Dylan Thomas, Jack London, Longfellow, Alexander Pope, Joyce, Pope, Eliot, Aphra Behn, Joan Barton, and feminists with whom she worked: Adrienne Rich, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, Marge Piercy, Marilyn French, Catherine Stimpson, Elaine Showalter - Talks unflinchingly about the ageing female body and living post-radiation. - Literary feminist "comes out" about the multiple cancer treatments she and her father (100) suffer. A homage to memory, writing, reading, surviving illness within a father and daughter's life and stories from round the world. - Beautiful writing analyses the nature of illness, the feelings and reactions, the fear of death. "To be deprived of outside words was to be deprived of a large part of life. Apart from the physical side effects the main discomfort came from the deprivation of words while under the machine". - When we are confronted by death, literature and art are distractions. - Differs from other examinations of death and art. Todd concludes literature is no help except for escape; it does not teach in the face of death, or leave us to understand meaning of life and death. Navigating ordinary life in 'Middle America '--death too? Jane Austen is for you. Milton and Dostoevsky's gigantic, rambunctious passions streaming through the firmament like never-ending fireworks and Mary Wollstonecraft, who hardly felt alive unless in turmoil, make for an unquiet life, is preparation for proper fear; they set the scene. - Not a conventional "where-there's-life-there's-hope" memoir of courage in the face of death or recovery, or the usual so-called end-of-life thoughts, she instead honestly examines the unfairness of chronic ill-health. Written with a beauty and eloquence that only someone of Todd's prodigious abilities can impart to such a painful experience - Todd's peripatetic life was led largely in books, while her half century of academic career entailed the writing and teaching of books, literary aspects covered as the author considers her literary life while she undergoes daily radiation therapies. - Current cancer titles focus on breast and younger people. Todd describes the older body's reaction to the more intimate tough cancers, the constant fear of mortality, living longer with after-effects of radical new treatments. Suitable for older readers and younger people dealing with any illness and treatments, and those who care for them. - Todd's literary diary fits with bestselling books on illness from Paul Kalanithi, when Breath Becomes Air; Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking; Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Cory Taylor, Dying: A Memoir - Author inaugurated women's writing and life writing/memoir courses in US and UK - book will appeal to teachers of creative writing, biography and memoir, literature of illness, death. Author has successful sales track record with 40+ non-fiction trade and academic books, and her novels.
About the Author :
Janet Todd, novelist (A Man of Genus, 2016) and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Douglass College, Rutgers, NJ and at the University of Florida. An expert on women's writing and feminism and founder of the journal, Women's Writing, she has published biographies and critical work on many authors, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn (Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, 2017). Now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen, she lives in Cambridge and Venice, and is completing her third novel, Don't You Know There's a War On? (forthcoming, 2019).
Review :
"Candid, courageous and often horribly amusing. I winced and laughed in equal measure", Salley Vickers, author of Miss Garnet's Angel and The Librarian (currently BBC R4 Book at Bedtime)
