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.

April tries to act nonchalant about the bungalow, but secretly she goes through the open house, hunts down the owner multiple times, and submits her own story in hopes of winning the buying rights.  To quote the book cover, she’s “convinced that this little house represents what she’s missing in her life – comfort, completeness, survival.”  But at what costs?  Her husband is slipping away and her daughter has sworn that she’ll never live there.  And just when April should be embracing life as a breast cancer survivor, she feels the pressure of mortality more every day.

I enjoyed reading The Last Beach Bungalow, it was a quick read that authentically explores the range of emotions that April goes through as she comes to term with what she thinks she wants as well as the aftermath of breast cancer.

Jennie Nash is also a breast cancer survivor who has authored three non-fiction books including The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming:  And Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer. Visit Jennie’s website and her blog will be up and running in November.  Jennie will share a guest post here on the Maw Books Blog about how breast cancer has effected her as a writer.  Watch for that coming up next.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which is dedicated to increasing awareness of breast cancer issues, especially the importance of early detection.  I encourage you to visit their site to learn more and take charge of yours or a loved one’s health.   Also visit to learn how you can get involved in helping in finding a cure for breast cancer research.  As for myself, earlier this year my family walked in the the Susan G. Korman Race for the Cure.  It was our first year participating and I’d like to do it again.

I’m dedicating this post to Stephanie at the Written Word, one of our own book bloggers who is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer.  Pay her a visit and lift her spirits.