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THE SUMMER OF HER BALDNESS: A Cancer Improvisation Catherine Lord Austin: University of Texas, 2004; 248 pp.
In The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation, Catherine Lord conflates existing notions of cancer as horrific disease and cancer patients as lone fighters in a way that re-energizes and yet problematizes them. She exposes the raw underbelly of the disease and its treatment in/through an online persona, the irascible, brutally honest, intelligent voice of Her Baldness. The result is a powerful book and I love it! As a woman living in the middle of breast cancer treatments and having read the watered-down, hospitaldelivered brochures about predominately white, hetero, upper middle-class survivors, I found her honesty coupled with rigourous self-reflection and analysis wonderfully refreshing and emotionally liberating.
Lord's writing, like Audre Lorde's,1 brings a unique and powerful voice forward, in this case in the body of a white, middle-class, lesbian. Unlike Lorde and myself though, the marker for her disease is not the lost breast (Lord has a lumpectomy), but rather the loss of hair due to chemo. She then focusses her writing through the self-referential persona, Her Baldness, and uses her to speak back to a society that stigmatizes bald women.
" I have short hair. I do not have a buzz cut. All I have is cancer" (p. 19).
Her Baldness catches the two most common symptoms of cancer: unwanted aloneness and loss of control. Instead of being angry at cancer or industrial polluters or the medical profession, Her Baldness gets mad at the people she knows. It's easier. She is manipulative, vindictive and at times petty. She whines. She's real. And whether we hear the voice of Catherine or Her Baldness, each has her own role. It is a conflicted relationship. They use each other, cover for each other and love each other.
In a hilarious exposé...