Second Life

Perhaps because the author's surname was the same as my pen name, I picked up this memoir in a secondhand bookshop. I soon discovered the prosaic cover belied its gory contents: a most grim, challenging, and disturbing read, as any good book should be. As far as my experience of memoirs goes, only Susan Blumberg-Kason's Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong (2014), about the tortuous breakdown of a marriage, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007), the New Agey bestseller about an American woman's postmarital redemption in the East, recently come to mind. Cook's memoir, by contrast, was written almost a half century ago in 1981, before the show more redemption memoir became its own genre. Far from the feel-good sentiments memoir readers seem to demand today, there’s not much redemption in this memoir; the unrecounted "second life" of Cook’s title follows upon the book's conclusion.

Her first life, covering her first three decades, is a case study and object lesson in modern patriarchal dominance, from her father's sexual fiddling with her as a child to her misdiagnoses by an elite cohort of physicians as a young woman, who repeatedly dismiss her suspicions of grave illness as mere psychosomatic griping (what in an earlier age was known as woman’s "hysteria"). Most of the memoir is taken up in hospital rooms. In her stark reality reduced to blank walls and IV lines, like Beckett's sucking stones, all dissolves into pure language, a wry, deadpan, unstoppable voice absorbing every detail around her in disciplined, stylish prose; a female Beckett, a modern Everywoman. It also conjures up those Renaissance paintings of a body dissected before an audience of rapt medical students of the time:

“In the hospital of rare diseases I am still rare enough to be the subject of a number of presentations by aspiring doctors on rotation….Each presentation requires that the resident or intern who is doing it examine me from top to bottom, inside and out…..And sometimes, somehow, these nervous, bright-eyed medical boys inspire in me lubricious fantasies….I climb up onto their tables and lie down, buckling my dumb wig [for hair loss due to chemo] as my head falls back on the fresh, waxy paper, and surrender myself to their probing and poking.”

As her choriocarcinoma (a rare cancer of the placenta) metastasizes throughout her body and she turns gaunt and her flesh discolored, they finally begin to take her symptoms seriously. Yet she is still misdiagnosed and persuaded to undergo a hysterectomy, an oophorectomy, open-heart surgery, and other unnecessary treatments, before they finally hit upon it--cancer!--and she’s thrust into multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Amidst all of this, she has an affair with her main doctor, and true to form, holds nothing back in her unflinching account of how sex and medicine mingle inexorably in the very hospital room, exposed genitals and all.

Cook pulls through in the end, only to be thrust into a new domestic crisis, the unraveling of her marriage. Here she wrestles with fundamental questions of self-autonomy upon which the book concludes, if somewhat inconclusively. We want to know more about her stints working as a fashion model and abortion clinic assistant (before her illness) and as a sex therapist and psychologist (after her illness)--experiences that would surely be all of a piece with the rest of the book. show less

enlightening but depressing