Five titles to read when your spouse Is diagnosed with cancer

Ariel Gore makes books, zines, coloring books, and tarot cards. She is the founding editor and publisher of the Alternative Press Award-winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of 13 lucky books of fiction and nonfiction, including Rehearsals for Dying, Hexing the Patriarchy, and The End of Eve. Her shameless novel/memoir, We Were Witches, was published by the Feminist Press, and her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. She teaches writing online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen.

At Lit Hub Gore tagged five books that helped her "navigate the emotional wilderness of loving someone with a terminal diagnosis." One title on the list:

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

When Deena was diagnosed, this was the first book I reached for. Published in 1980, Lorde’s raw, unflinching account of her breast cancer diagnosis, mastectomy, and the emotional aftermath remains startlingly relevant.

As a Black lesbian feminist poet facing the medical establishment of the 1970s, Lorde brings a critical eye to the politics of cancer treatment, offers deep insight into the psychological experience of confronting mortality, and illuminates the way that queer and female friendship is as important—more important—than any chemical treatment.

“Your silence will not protect you,” Lorde wrote. It’s a famous line. I’d forgotten it came from The Cancer Journals. The book stands as a powerful antidote to the isolation that too often come with a cancer diagnosis, reminding us that our private suffering has political dimensions, and that community and connection remain vital—always.

Lorde shows us how to maintain our full humanity—our anger, our grief, our sexuality, our joy—even as the cancer industrial complex tries to reduce us to patient-hood.

Like Audre, Deena didn’t want to be “brave”—as Deena’s spouse, I didn’t want to be brave, either—but we had no choice. And that unchosen bravery, Lorde reminded us, could transform us: “What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

Read about the other entries on Gore's list.

Also see five of the best books about living with cancer and ten top books about cancer.

--Marshal Zeringue