Stories

Y’all came here for stories about living through cancer, but today you get books. Because books are also integral to living through cancer. Books are integral to life.

My focus has been coming back, like a missed companion. For short bursts, my mind, my friend, can read things, can remember, can analyse, can learn.

For anyone going through chemotherapy treatments, chronic illness or recovery, mental illness, grief, or … (!), even if the desire is there, the energy or ability to focus may not be. And it can be an extremely frustrating and dull place to be. SO BLOODY DULL.

Brain fog is very real. Fatigue is very real. And I say this to say it to myself, really. Because I find others accept this very readily and compassionately for me. So many people have told me to take it easy, and not dive back in too quickly; I’m the one reaching.

But, when we’re together, my mind and I can do such wonderful things.

And together, we have devoured books. Books with stories, with imaginations, with worlds outside our own. We have consumed stories, chapter after chapter, being greedy with time, needing to know what will happen. The world of a story we can collapse into; something that invokes the senses and converses with emotions.

At night, I read until one eye shuts and the other squints in order to focus, until Mohamed walks in and laughs at the absurdity of it, or the sleepiness does a disservice to the story and I have to admit it’s time to stop.

When I first went into treatment a few years ago I was reading my usual mash up of non-fiction novels, a few haphazardly going at once, always reading to learn something. I can’t do that right now, it’s too much hard work. But I have got to a point where I can read stories. Reading a story doesn’t require you to learn, analyse or remember new information, it just lets you take a break. And get all swallowed up.

So, here is my list of really fucking great stories, ordered by the way I received them.

From loved ones:

Ahdaf Soueif - The map of love

Fundamentally a pair of love stories, across cultures, and through generations. Any book that starts with a family tree always gets me intrigued, knowing there will be the weaving of lives and stories, grandparents and parents and children, encompassed by the evolution of society and economy. Beautiful in its telling, what lingers for me is the experience offered of 1900s Egypt, the richness of culture, and the resistance to ruthless British imperialism.

Anthony Doerr - All the light we cannot see

This book came from mum’s bookshelf, and I’d picked up and not read it so many times. It looked dense with small writing, and I’m not always in the mood for novels about world wars. But over the last few years I’ve felt like it’s been following me, copies popping up in friends’ bookshelves all over the place, which is as good a recommendation as any. So eventually, I opened it.

This book is not about the war, but about two children caught up in it on either side, one German, one French. Though it is implied they will meet eventually, their stories are fully and richly their own, and it is these stories, their kindness and their heartbreak, that captured me.

The structural generosity of this book for someone with a questionable attention span is that it is broken into very short character-specific chapters. (These very short chapters then trick you into never stopping reading.)

Joan Druett - Island the of the lost

An adventure and survival (or not - depending on the group) novel written by an actual maritime historian, about two different ships’ crews that are wrecked on Auckland Island in the 1860s. It’s got everything you want in a story like this: suspense, in-fighting, and true-story ingenuity beyond normal peoples’ imagination.

Jennifer Worth - In the midst of life

I am inside this book right now and it has overtaken me. Jennifer Worth trained as a nurse in the 1950s in the UK, and experienced the evolution of nursing and medicine that has drastically improved our survival rates, but destroyed, in the English-speaking world at least, our acceptance of natural and dignified death. We rarely live alongside our dying grandparents any more to allow for dying to be a part of our living; dying is seen as traumatic, and we are scared.

There is so much to say about this book that I cannot put into words right now, but it has introduced me to the calmness and peace that can occur when someone knows they are dying, has made peace with their dying, and is allowed to die.

From the library display shelf:

Laurel Frankie - One, Two, Three

One, Two and Three are three triplets, Mab, Monday and Maribel, who live in a backwater town with their mother. Their father is dead. You slowly understand that the town’s incredibly high incidence of children born with disabilities, anger and despair is due to a chemical plant, 17 years earlier, dumping hazardous waste into the local town water supply, knowing it was doing it, then packing up and leaving. (No spoilers, this is in the book’s blurb on the library website.)

This is a story about environmental (in)justice and economic desperation, and industrial power and manipulation. But, fundamentally and most importantly, the power of community.

It reminds me of another book — also recommended! — which follows the lives of the women poisoned by the radioactive chemicals they used to paint dials on clocks in the early 1900s for the war effort: The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore. This book was written to give voice to and honour those women who were denied justice time and time again while they were alive, and truly suffering. I read this earlier in the year (around the time I started this Substack) and it gave me a morbid sense of perspective; at least my jaw wasn’t disintegrating in my mouth. Life was comparatively pretty good. …is it ok to admit to that?

It is horrifying the amount of power corporations have to manipulate the “science” and the law, and like all of these things, this is not a thing of the past. Think tobacco, think sugar, think climate change…

Eleanor Catton - Birnam Wood

Your classic story of rogue anti-capitalism vege gardening collective in Christchurch meet an American billionaire with a drone company on a property in Otago’s hinterland. The vibe feels wrong from the start, but you gotta know why and how and lean into what becomes quite a wild ride.

Another story of little guys and big money, conservation and profit, but everyone’s a bit fucked up.

Clare Moleta - Unsheltered
Technically not the display shelf, but, I think, a newsletter listing “climate stories to read over summer” from 2021.

This book was such an unexpected phenomenon to me. If you can’t imagine what our lives may look like once droughts ruin our ability to grow crops, and storms wipe out our towns, read this. As someone who works in this space, this imagining is the artwork that makes real the end point of all the science, all the policy, all the action and inaction.

Climate change is the backdrop to this story of a woman searching for her daughter, following her, stumbling across a Western Australia that has socially and economically disintegrated. Agency, Weather, Sheltered and Unsheltered: the concepts Moleta uses, casually, as if we understand them, are a warning to us all, and perhaps even more evocatively, reflective of the society we live in now, where some are allowed through the doors to Shelter, and others are kept out.

Because my mate wrote it and it’s exceptional:

Michaela Keeble and Kerehi Grace and Tokerau Brown - Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai

Wonderful, whimsical, colourful and honest. This is the best kids (and adults) book to go and find right now(!), to remember what it’s like to grow up, when you actually say what you think, and you know way more than the adults think you know.

Kia ora!

My name is

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai.

You can call me

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai.

Damn straight.

I don’t know if this one is in the library yet, but you can get it at Gecko Press, and likely, your local bookstore.

That’s it. Those my reccs. Have a fab weekend friends, and don’t forget to vote!