Contralateral Damage
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My One-night Stand with Cancer: A Memoir
by Tania Katan
Alyson Books. 285 pages, $15.95

YOUNG WOMEN—those under forty—represent less than five percent of all women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society’s latest statistics. Arizona native Tania Katan, a stand-up comic when she was in high school and now a successful playwright in Los Angeles, was a 21-year-old theatre major when she was diagnosed with that disease.

Given those circumstances, this is a remarkably dry-eyed journal, which jumps between entries written in 1992, when Katan was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer in her right breast, and