Of the myriad impossible things one could believe before breakfast, one morning Katherine Russell Rich finds a lump in her left breast. She was taking a shower, soaping herself down, when her fingers "slid into it, and stopped."

Her brain seized. She knew instantly what it was, and never stopped knowing- although well-meaning others, statistics, doctors, friends, either blew her off, or seduced her temporarily into forgetting what she knew. Coming in the wake of a divorce, "of course that lump was cancer. What else was it going to be?"

The Red Devil is the story, in Alice-in Wonderland-fashion, of one woman’s bout with invasive breast cancer. It is a cautionary tale of following one’s own certainty, when down a rabbit hole (or a sinkhole), however illogical it may seem to others. Rich writes from a self-discovery and kick-ass style forced upon her by a terrible, deathly disease, her words chock full of "unasked-for clarity" and "sudden, disconcerting wisdom."

One very valuable lesson Rich learns is that she must find ways of staying connected to the everyday world she knew prior to her fall into "Cancerland." "Cancer is infantile in its demands," she writes. "By demanding constant vigilance, it makes you self-absorbed." The "disease becomes a siren"; if you fall prey to its toxic magic, its "enforced narcissism" contributes to distancing you from everyone and everything around you. The fact of the illness, too, often repels other people, making you a social outcast. "’People don’t want to hear about it,’" says Rich’s great-aunt, also a cancer survivor. Or worse-they speak to you as if you’re already dead. But, "I wasn’t really dead inside," Rich writes. "I had mistaken quiet for emptiness. My life wasn’t hollow, it was fallow. It had become like a field in early spring, brown and plain on the surface, teeming with renewal below."

The siren’s underbelly is the "cancer-patient-as-hero-myth," but Rich sees her situation through steely eyes; her "distaste for illness hype" and her "knowledge of the lump" keep her chaste, even as she succumbs to its glamour. Cancer "acts as an intensifier," and like money, forces people to "behave like more concentrated versions of themselves. For better. For worse." You get to see what you’re really made of when, after surgery, radiation, chemo, and various other indignities suffered at the hands of a "cure," "you’re leaving little pieces of yourself all over town."

For "some people," Rich observes, out of desperation to find meaning in their illness, the disease becomes "their identity, their covering." The illusion of "being an inspiration" was an understandable, though unimaginable, taboo; for her, "it seemed dangerous to voice your investment in calamity," to milk the illness, to be a Cancer Queen. Yet she herself comes to realize, with steely-eyed precision, what with her "divorce, cancer, and pariah-hood," that she herself had nestled at the siren’s cozy underbelly, replaying her own tragedies over and over again until she was tired of them! "Sick of being indebted to tragedy for definition, of regarding it as predictive," Rich decides to "become her own psychic," and predict a positive future.

As Marc Edmund Jones wrote in his Studies in Alice IV, "Alice began to conquer her predicament when she began to use what was immediately at hand, particularly the pebbles thrown in at her." By putting misfortune to work for her, Jones writes, Alice transforms her pebbles into magic cakes.

Likewise, in The Red Devil, Katherine Russell Rich comes to taste, through her sharp "pebbles" of desolation and suffering, the "magic cakes" of life and universal harmony; she recognizes that they, those other people she speaks of-whomever they are-are really we. She comes to appreciate that "all illness is ordinary-unfortunate, in some instances, and hard, but ordinary." That "suffering, along with joy, makes us human." That, "if your mind remains open," the poison love-apple of cancer can bring you straight to the heart of your own humanity.

Melanie Mineo lives on Long Island, NY. She teaches philosophy at Dowling College, and also works as a consultant and a philosophical counselor.

Categories: Memoirs, General