Maw Books

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Give a warm welcome to Jennie Nash, author of The Last Beach Bungalow who shares with us her journey of breast cancer and how it effected her as a writer.  It’s an excellent guest post and I’m pleased that Jennie has taken a moment to share it us.  Take a moment to read my book review of The Last Beach Bungalow as well as follow some links to learn more about National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Now on to Jennie  . . .

How Cancer Changed Me

People always say that cancer changes you, which makes sense because it’s an experience that forces you to face your mortality. I was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer right at the turn of the millennium, so the whole notion of transformation was very much in the air. I kept looking at myself and thinking, okay, how is cancer going to change my life. I knew women whose diagnosis had spurred them to leave bad boyfriends, bad jobs, bad towns. I love being a writer, I love my husband, and I think I live in a pretty great place, so none of those things was going to be it for me. The one nagging desire that wouldn’t get out of my head was a simple wish that I didn’t even understand: I wanted to live with more color.

I took the desire quite literally, and painted every wall in my house a fantastic new shade – pumpkin spice, crowne hill yellow, fern, Hawaiian blue. My favorite room, by far, is my office, which is the pumpkin-colored space. This room has windows on three sides and even though it faces my tame suburban neighborhood street, it feels to me like the prow of a ship sailing through a California  sunset. It was in this room that I finally figured out what painting the walls was all about.

White walls are exactly like blank pages, which the novelist Jonathan Safron Foer calls “empty and infinite.” They are full of possibility. I had been a writer for nearly twenty years when I was diagnosed with cancer, but I come from a family of academics and I always worried that unless I spent years in a library studying, I had nothing that was worth saying. I didn’t think the magazine articles and the memoirs I had published really counted. After being diagnosed, treated and declared free of cancer, I didn’t want to live with possibility anymore. I was tired of having potential. Wanting more color was really about wanting to create a more colorful world, both in my life and on the page.

It was in my pumpkin-colored office that I became a novelist – the most satisfying, enthralling, wonderful thing I think anyone could be (well, besides simply being alive.). I sat there and pounded out my first novel, and kept on pounding through draft after draft until I became a storyteller. That book was The Last Beach Bungalow. The editor I worked with immediately gave me the opportunity to write a second novel, which is The Only True Genius in the Family, coming out in February ’09. You can read an excerpt at www.jennienash.com. I have just signed a contract to write my third novel.

Cancer definitely changed me because the experience gave me permission to find my true voice.

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