Breast cancer is buzzing in the media almost everywhere we look this month making October’s official designation as “Breast Cancer Awareness Month” practically impossible to miss. In its honor, Red Tent Sisters’ reading selection for our monthly book group deals with a very “au currant” breast cancer related topic—a genetic test that is now available for identifying “the breast cancer gene”, and of course the ethical debates that it spawns. First time author, Jessica Queller, TV writer for Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill, turns to her own personal encounters with cancer, with the frighteningly advanced world of genetic technology and with overwhelming decisions that it brings about to produce what I thought was a gracefully written, emotionally-gripping and thought provoking memoir. In “Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, the Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny” Jessica Queller makes a valuable contribution to the rapidly expanding body of breast cancer related popular literature.
Without a great deal of ethical deliberation or emotional preparation, Jessica takes a test for the breast cancer gene mutation shortly after losing her mother to an agonizing struggle with ovarian cancer (we also learn that her mother endured and overcame breast cancer years earlier). Unexpectedly, 34 year old Jessica—who also happens to be emphatically single and childless—tests positive for the BRCA-1 mutation, immediately burdening her with the knowledge that she has up to an 87% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer and up to a 44% lifetime risk of developing ovarian cancer. As readers, we accompany Jessica through her information-(and soul)-seeking quest that eventually leads to her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy.
With a knack for comprehensibly interweaving complicated medical information into her personal narrative, “Pretty is What Changes” was as informative for me as it was emotionally satisfying. I found this to be appropriate for a book that asks (and ultimately answers “yes” to) the question “Is knowledge power?” From listening to the breast cancer experiences of participants in last Friday evening’s discussion group, I learned that the emotional flexibility demanded of the author to alternate between the voice-of-reason and the frantic voice-of-emotion, reflected many women’s feelings of having to bear not just the physical and emotional burden of illness, but also the burden of responsibility to take health-related decision making into their own hands with sound rationality and factual clarity. Shifts in access-to-information and decision-making authority from doctor to patient (changes that are in many ways indebted to the Women’s Health Movement of the 70’s) are thankfully important principles of our contemporary medical milieu. I was glad to find that the book expressed the overwhelming aspects of such responsibility that are often overshadowed by an emphasis on “patient empowerment” in this age-of-information and self-help.
The theme of bringing a sense of community to the potentially isolating experience of disease, is significant in the book as we see Jessica reaching out to online (and real world) breast cancer networks of women for information-sharing and moral support. It is no wonder that the book she produces herself serves the similar purpose of providing a narrative through which readers can mediate and make sense of their own similar experiences and of bolstering a (quickly growing) public breast cancer discourse.
Without a great deal of ethical deliberation or emotional preparation, Jessica takes a test for the breast cancer gene mutation shortly after losing her mother to an agonizing struggle with ovarian cancer (we also learn that her mother endured and overcame breast cancer years earlier). Unexpectedly, 34 year old Jessica—who also happens to be emphatically single and childless—tests positive for the BRCA-1 mutation, immediately burdening her with the knowledge that she has up to an 87% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer and up to a 44% lifetime risk of developing ovarian cancer. As readers, we accompany Jessica through her information-(and soul)-seeking quest that eventually leads to her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy.
With a knack for comprehensibly interweaving complicated medical information into her personal narrative, “Pretty is What Changes” was as informative for me as it was emotionally satisfying. I found this to be appropriate for a book that asks (and ultimately answers “yes” to) the question “Is knowledge power?” From listening to the breast cancer experiences of participants in last Friday evening’s discussion group, I learned that the emotional flexibility demanded of the author to alternate between the voice-of-reason and the frantic voice-of-emotion, reflected many women’s feelings of having to bear not just the physical and emotional burden of illness, but also the burden of responsibility to take health-related decision making into their own hands with sound rationality and factual clarity. Shifts in access-to-information and decision-making authority from doctor to patient (changes that are in many ways indebted to the Women’s Health Movement of the 70’s) are thankfully important principles of our contemporary medical milieu. I was glad to find that the book expressed the overwhelming aspects of such responsibility that are often overshadowed by an emphasis on “patient empowerment” in this age-of-information and self-help.
The theme of bringing a sense of community to the potentially isolating experience of disease, is significant in the book as we see Jessica reaching out to online (and real world) breast cancer networks of women for information-sharing and moral support. It is no wonder that the book she produces herself serves the similar purpose of providing a narrative through which readers can mediate and make sense of their own similar experiences and of bolstering a (quickly growing) public breast cancer discourse.
Though Queller makes an honest effort to avoid a preachy tone, and insists that she is not necessarily advocating her choices to her audience, she ends the book by sharply and unquestionably asking her readers to seize the opportunities that biomedical technology offers. For Jessica, the luxury of living her life on her own timeline and according to her own inclinations (with respect to career, romance and childbearing, for instance) was robbed from her with the knowledge of her BRCA-1+ status. With “choice” and its feminist implications at the heart of this book, I’d like to highlight a brilliant analogy she makes at one point between the menu of options for consumers of breast reconstruction surgery, and the vast menu of drink options at Starbucks. She is certainly right that the exercise of custom-ordering our latte (or our breasts for that matter) according to our inner visions of ourselves can feel terrifically empowering. She fails to offer her reader the insight, however, that in being engrossed in such “choices” we often forget to ask ourselves whether (or why) we really wanted the latte (or the breast reconstruction) in the first place. In fact, as Amy pointed out on Friday, the option of NOT reconstructing her breasts after her mastectomy isn’t even entertained once in the book.
And while we’re on the subject of feminism, it must be said that as much as Queller’s narrative provides a rough script with which we can navigate the options that come along with our respective cancer-statuses, she does the same for that of our gender-status. Unfortunately, her vision of femininity is really rather narrow. She limits her reflection of the sexual significance of her breasts to being merely lures for potential male mates, granting them no sexual value in-it-of-themselves. Regarding the fulfillment of her desires to mother, she sooner turns to reproductive technologies before ever entertaining the possibility of adoption. Her affluent Hollywood lifestyle allows her to contemplate the philosophical consequences of the BRCA test and of preventative mastectomy without ever having to think about class issues of access to the test and to healthcare itself. Most objectionable, I’d say, is that for Jessica, the tragedy of her genetic discovery lies not in the fact that her life might be truncated but rather in that it might end before she can fill her feminine duty of becoming a wife and mother.
Queller’s memoir, as truly enjoyable a read as it was for me, is most certainly not an exception to trends I have found in my own research, which finds breast-cancer related media to be an especially lucrative site for promoting uncritical submission to biomedicine and for reproducing a very limited image of femininity. If and when you read Pretty Is What Changes”, help me reflect on why this might be, and help honor Breast Cancer Awareness month by bringing your brilliant feminist minds to Red Tent at the end of the month, when we continue this discussion.
- Jaclyn Isen, Honourary Red Tent Sister & Blogger
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1 comments:
greaaat one
keep it up
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