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 those written ten years later, when she was diagnosed with cancer in her other—in medical jargon, her contralateral—breast. It’s not surprising that she became so terrified as to be almost suicidal, feeling at times like “a character in a Tony Kushner play.” The fact that she had a genetic predisposition for cancer can’t really explain why she contracted it at such a young age, and twice.
This is not a book with a lot of medical terminology in it, which may cause frustration for more technically inclined readers, but others will probably be pleased not to have to bother with a glossary or footnotes. There are, as one might expect, a goodly number of anecdotes filled with unpleasant doctors, bad reactions to anesthesia, and all the trials of dealing with chemo-therapy and the aftereffects of surgery.
Katan’s wildly outgoing personality is what allows her to keep going through it all, enduring not only the cancer but a string of rather awful relationships, including the two girlfriends who happened to find her breast lumps, ten years apart. When the occasional “Ms. Right” comes along, it’s a relief for both author and reader. Katan’s biological family is fairly dysfunctional (but whose isn’t?): she has a twin brother and a younger sister, and her parents are divorced, but they all manage to pull together fairly well when necessary. Katan’s French-born mother in particular turns out to be a pillar of strength. Her mother is also in possession of some unusual coping skills, such as taking magazines from doctors’ offices and obsessing over the younger generation’s pop stars during serious conversations.
Katan is of two minds about the vast array of consumer items bearing pink ribbon emblems, most of which bear no relationship to breast cancer cures, but in a touching and brave scene, she ran a ten-kilometer breast cancer fundraiser race—topless—in Los Angeles, and was happy to receive a pink ribbon around her neck, having finished the race in under an hour, on a route lined with Cub Scouts. And there’s also a happy ending on the relationship front, at least for now, as Katan has settled into a less tumultuous life with her lover in LA, where she continues to write plays and perform at readings.
