The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (Constructs Series)
“No eyebrows. No eyelashes. When it rains the water will run straight down into my eyes,” Catherine Lord wrote before her hair fell out during chemotherapy. Propelled into an involuntary performance piece occasioned by the diagnosis of breast cancer, Lord adopted the online persona of Her Baldness—an irascible, witty, polemical presence who speaks candidly about shame and fear to her listserv audience. While Lord suffers from unwanted isolation and loss of control as her treatment progresses,...
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"No eyebrows. No eyelashes. When it rains the water will run straight down into my eyes," Catherine Lord wrote before her hair fell out during chemotherapy. Propelled into an involuntary performance piece occasioned by the diagnosis of breast cancer, Lord adopted the online persona of Her Baldness--an irascible, witty, polemical presence who speaks candidly about shame and fear to her listserv audience. While Lord suffers from unwanted isolation and loss of control as her treatment progresses, Her Baldness talks back to the society that stigmatizes bald women, not to mention middle-aged lesbians with a life-threatening disease. In this irreverent and moving memoir, Lord draws on the e-mail correspondence of Her Baldness to offer an unconventional look at life with breast cancer and the societal space occupied by the seriously ill. She photographs herself and the rooms in which she negotiates her disease. She details the clash of personalities in support groups, her ambivalence about Western medicine, her struggles to maintain her relationship with her partner, and her bemusement when she is mistaken for a "sir." She uses these experiences--common to the one-in-eight women who will be diagnosed at some point with breast cancer--to illuminate larger issues of gender signifiers, sexuality, and the construction of community. Library Journal If you are going to have breast cancer, how wonderful to be diagnosed in the age of the Internet. Computers. Online databases. Finding information on your disease. Verifying physicians' credentials. Evaluating treatments and therapies. Starting your own discussion list/blog called Her Baldness. Huh? Well, perhaps California art professor Lord did use the Internet to track down diagnostic procedures and chemotherapy reactions. But mostly she set up her own web site and transmitted her thoughts and feelings to family and friends and pieced her output and their input into this exquisitely personal and lethally honest memoir of a year with breast cancer. Lord is equally witty and winsome, charismatic and curmudgeonly. She takes a risk-factor quiz: "Almost half of my risk increase [from 2% to 4%, the risk factor of a woman of 60] comes from being a tall, childless, light-skinned lesbian .in her 51st year. Make that a lesbian who took care of herself by getting mammograms more or less regularly .[and] being a white, conscientious, childless dyke has cost me ten years." With her, we experience chemotherapy and radiation and all the concomitant reactions. We go with her to support groups. We lose our hair. Mostly, we laugh and nod at her wise and wise-cracking revelations. Warmly recommended for patient health and gay/lesbian collections. Bette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
June 2001 (LOOKING BACKWARD: CONFESSIONS OF HER BALDNESS)May/June 2000July 2000August 2000September 2000October 2000November 2000December 2000January 2001February 2001March 2001April 2001May 2001March 2003 (A LETTER TO HER BALDNESS)
\ Library JournalIf you are going to have breast cancer, how wonderful to be diagnosed in the age of the Internet. Computers. Online databases. Finding information on your disease. Verifying physicians' credentials. Evaluating treatments and therapies. Starting your own discussion list/blog called Her Baldness. Huh? Well, perhaps California art professor Lord did use the Internet to track down diagnostic procedures and chemotherapy reactions. But mostly she set up her own web site and transmitted her thoughts and feelings to family and friends and pieced her output and their input into this exquisitely personal and lethally honest memoir of a year with breast cancer. Lord is equally witty and winsome, charismatic and curmudgeonly. She takes a risk-factor quiz: "Almost half of my risk increase [from 2% to 4%, the risk factor of a woman of 60] comes from being a tall, childless, light-skinned lesbian .in her 51st year. Make that a lesbian who took care of herself by getting mammograms more or less regularly .[and] being a white, conscientious, childless dyke has cost me ten years." With her, we experience chemotherapy and radiation and all the concomitant reactions. We go with her to support groups. We lose our hair. Mostly, we laugh and nod at her wise and wise-cracking revelations. Warmly recommended for patient health and gay/lesbian collections. Bette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.\ \
