Mom's Cancer

A family's struggle with cancer provides the plot for this touching and honest graphic memoir.

Brian's mom, after suffering a brief seizure, discovers that she has stage 4 lung cancer that has metastasized to her brain. She has less than a 5% chance of survival. Her choice to fight, and the awful toll cancer treatments take on her body and independence changes the family dynamic. Brian, Kid Sis and Nurse Sis each take on a different care-giving role, and the best and worst of their personalities come to light.

What I love about this book is that it's not what it seems to be. Picking it up, I thought "Great... another dead parent memoir." However, ultimately, this is a story about life and hope and families. Fries' slightly cartoony art show more style works gives realism to the proceedings, but remains clean and accessible. Also, sometimes, it's just nice to see a happy ending. show less

From the first pages I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Sure, Fies’ work is an Eisner Award winner, a book form graphic novel born out of an anonymous, online comic strip the author wrote as a kind of self-therapy while dealing with his own mother’s cancer. That alone is quite a bit to recommend the work. But there was something about the simplicity of Fies’ lines that gave me pause. It’s a little cartoony with very little depth of image (a complex panels is the narrator sitting in a chair watching TV, drapes behind him over his shoulder), so I worried I’d be getting a Hallmark card journey through illness and health.But there is something to Scott McCloud’s assertion made in Understanding Comics that the simpler the show more image the closer it approaches universality, which is to some degree an unintended point in Fies’ work. Written for himself to say all the things he couldn’t say to his family, to better understand all the things happening around him and to him, Fies’ work touched a chord all across the world. Word-of-mouth spread and increased the work’s popularity. The story, begun without intentional shape or structure, manages to jell nicely as a piece with the satisfying wholeness of a tale told without undue elaboration or dramatics.To keep things simple, Fies limits the story almost entirely to the narrator and his two sisters, known throughout the work as Kid Sis and Nurse Sis, and the eponymous Mom. Doctors and nurses of various types float in and out through the story, as does a kind of spectral figure of the long-absent Dad. We watch in a kind of helpless fascination as Mom submits to treatment, first six weeks of radiation coupled with chemo (the radiation designed to get the metastasized node in her brain), then chemo alone to treat the cancer in her lungs. Technical aspects are not glossed over, but they are reduced to their most easily understood hearts, aided by Fies clarity of pen.Mom’s Cancer is unsparing in its finger pointing. In one scene, in reply to Mom’s question: “Can you tell what caused it?” her doctor replies tartly: “In my experience, one of five things: smoking, smoking, smoking, smoking, or smoking.” In other places, as we watch a headshot of Mom as she undergoes treatment, losing hair and becoming more gaunt from panel to panel, we watch the stages of grief play themselves out including the confessional final shot. “But you know, I still want it,” Mom tells us here. “I’d smoke a pack now if I could.”Unsurprisingly, the narrator’s observation after having nagged his mother to quit through the decades, “Somehow saying ‘I told you so’ turned out to be a lot less satisfying than I imagined” has the chest clenching ring of a true experience. For such a short volume with such simply drawn characters, Fies has managed to pour the essence of grief, the nub of experience into his pen and devastatingly out onto the page.There were more than a few instances I found myself, hand to my throat as I read, blinking back tears. A panel late in the story, in the depth of her treatment, hairless, Mom turning to her daughter with a desperate panic in her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks — she’s just found out after all these months that only five percent of patients in her condition live — made me set the book down until I felt I could continue. To look at it now, two weeks after I first read it, to see the stark beauty of Fies’ art in that one look is to catch just the faintest whisper of the despair of chronic illness of any kind.It is also to see art, pure and simple. show less

Often when someone becomes ill, their identity is supplanted by their illness. The people around them no longer see a life in progress just the diagnosis. This bothers me about this sometimes compelling, often not graphic novel. We have lost the MOM to her CANCER while she is still alive. This is even reflected in the title where the key word is CANCER and not MOM. I can’t think that this was the intention of the author, this feeling of detachment—where instead of being the earth, MOM was relegated to the moon.

This book, however, does have some strengths. It might have been titled CANCER FAMILY instead of MOM’S CANCER to better reflect what it does best. There are three adult children. Seeing how each goes through their own show more stages in different ways and how they come together or don’t come together over the illness is to finally be invited into the story. The siblings are rendered with an honesty that makes them feel real. I wish that had been extended to the MOM.

I have been part of a cancer family several times, including my own mom, and expected this to hit me harder than it did. I actually hoped it would hit me hard as a means of remembering and grieving. Instead, I felt like I was reading about a plane crash from the point of view of the land that was hit rather than the people on board.

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If you've been through cancer with a family member, you will see parts of your experience in this collection of Brian Feis's webcomic that was started when his mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. This is an honest look at how cancer impacts an entire family where we're spared the cliched movie-of-the week life lessons and magical epiphanies where everyone comes together to do the right thing. This is the reality of the sometimes humorous side of illness, the long and draining side of it, the inappropriate moments and the stress that a long-term illness will have on everyone and the way that they'll approach the illness.

Above that, it's a story of the hope that a family will find in each other. It's the kind of story that will show more find you laughing one moment and tearing up the next. Much like life. show less

Merideth says: A family's struggle with cancer provides the plot for this touching and honest graphic memoir.

Brian's mom, after suffering a brief seizure, discovers that she has stage 4 lung cancer that has metastasized to her brain. She has less than a 5% chance of survival. Her choice to fight, and the awful toll cancer treatments take on her body and independence changes the family dynamic. Brian, Kid Sis and Nurse Sis each take on a different care-giving role, and the best and worst of their personalities come to light.

What I love about this book is that it's not what it seems to be. Picking it up, I thought 'Great... another dead parent memoir.' However, ultimately, this is a story about life and hope and families. Fries' show more slightly cartoony art style works gives realism to the proceedings, but remains clean and accessible. Also, sometimes, it's just nice to see a happy ending. (cross-posted from MeriJenBen) show less

This memoir of a three adult children working (mostly) together to support their mother through her illness was originally published as an online web comic. The author and his two sisters, who he calls Nurse Sis and Kid Sis, each struggle with their own issues, and fumble through their own uncertainties and fear while earnestly trying to help their mother deal with lung cancer.

Mom and children are sometimes brave and sometime fearful, and their book is real, funny, sad and touching.

It's an okay book if you don't have someone close to you who have cancer. I really like this book because I connected to the characters. It was too familiar to me. It made me realize that what families feel and what they go through are the same wherever you are, whatever kind of cancer. This book made me laugh and cry and HOPE.