My One-Night Stand With Cancer - Softcover

Tania Katan is a playwrite and stand up comic living in Los Angeles.

Katan, shown naked above the waist in her back-of-the-book photo, sacrificed a breast to stage three cancer at 21. The disease recurred 10 years later, but she survived to prove, perhaps, that laughter is in fact the best medicine. In any event, the Jewish lesbian's memoir is loaded with humor. When a girlfriend found a lump on her breast, Katan calmed her nerves at the breast clinic by pretending she was a rock star and completing the intake form by indicating lesbian sex as her preferred form of birth control. By alternating, during a description of an ultrasound, between her real past as an impoverished, 16-year-old, dateless, friendless "drama fag" who wrote standup and fantasies of her present self as a lesbo porn star, Katan establishes a then-and-now structure for insights infused with wry comedy: remarks like "toxic girlfriends give me cancer" and characters including hypochondriac Nurse Fred, who fears those who lick books. With lymph nodes negative and outlook positive despite lightning striking twice, this 10K runner shows great spirit and strength. Whitney Scott
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