D R A M A_ Q U E E N

Drama Queen for a Day
Wherefore art thou, wierdo? Send us your tales of the strangest declarations of love you've received for a chance to win a $100 gift certificate from barnesandnoble.com.

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E D I T O R ' S_N O T E

Look for excerpts from Anne Lamott's new book, "Traveling Mercies," on Fridays; Word by Word, Lamott's biweekly Thursday column, will return March 4.

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T A B L E_T A L K

Should women be able to have elective C-sections? Sound off on risk and choice in childbirth in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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Search barnesandnoble.comfor books about parenting and the family
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R E C E N T L Y

Raging hormones
By Celeste Fremon
When I gave birth at nearly 40, I never considered the fact that 12years later my son and I would both be having hot flashes
(01/25/99)

Momcat
By Anne Lamott
Believing in a radical Christian Scientist named Lee
(01/22/99)

Girly girl
By Mona Gable
If you spent your girlhood learning to toughen up, what happens when your daughter is the sensitive type who makes flower stews?
(01/21/99)

Better ead than uck
By Polly Shulman
New ABC books are breathing life into an old genre by making letters vanish, get lost and pop up in unexpected places
(01/20/99)

The bento chronicles
By Jane Singer
An expatriate mom in Japan learns that a dewhiskered Hello Kitty rice ball in her child's lunch could forever condemn her as a rotten mother
(01/19/99)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

DESPITE A LIFELONG LOVE AFFAIR WITH DEATH, GETTING BREAST CANCER MAKES IT CLEAR THAT IT IS A VERY DIFFERENT LOVE THAT I TRULY CRAVE.

"WET EARTH AND DREAMS: A NARRATIVE OF GRIEF AND RECOVERY"
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
122 PAGES

Editor's Note: "In the spring of 1995," writes Jane Lazarre in her latest memoir, "Wet Earth and Dreams," "the condition I seem to have been waiting for all my life finally struck me." That condition is breast cancer -- the same disease that killed her mother when Lazarre was a small child, an event that has deeply etched itself onto her life as a writer, a mother and a wife. In this excerpt, set during the early weeks after Lazarre's diagnosis, the author has just begun to probe the surface of her experience of breast cancer, which is weighted not just with fear and loss but also with memories.

BY JANE LAZARRE | I am trying to understand one experience by what it shares with another. Patterns come to me, clusters of memories that seem to belong together, and I cannot, simply for the sake of ease or sequence, keep them apart. Old memories of the months preceding and the early years after my mother's death when I was seven years old. A panic attack I experienced when Khary was attending a semester abroad, months before the cancer cells won their battle with my immune system and hardened into a tumor. And chemotherapy, which so frightened me I could write neither the word nor the name of the doctor in my journal but had to resort to initials, or watch my barely manageable fears escalate out of control.

I will not perceive the connections among these memories until all the cancer treatments are done. But I am dreaming with vague knowledge of being ashamed, and the shame is always for needing something I cannot have, or something that is not what I thought it to be. Somehow, I am humiliated, not merely disappointed; exposed, not merely wrong. A little beggar girl I saw long ago in a poverty-stricken street in Naples is in my kitchen. She looks at me with the pathetic eyes of a hungry cat and scratches on my refrigerator door with dirty, bitten nails. A river fills with blood, and long-missing bodies float to the surface while I sit in a boat aloof, even dissociated, wondering at the strangeness of what is happening right before my eyes. A distanced critic, I watch the dramas and keep track of all of the themes.

Now, I turn back the pages of my journal to the day I found the lump, a surprisingly undifferentiated hardness I wasn't even sure was a lump at first. I read my brief entry the day I went for a needle biopsy and received the diagnosis. "You are the fifth person I have diagnosed with breast cancer this morning," the radiologist said to me, and it was only noon. "It's an epidemic."

But eight months before that, when I was experiencing increasingly intense panic attacks, I had written: I feel as if an actual illness inhabits me. Something at once foreign and part of me devouring myself.

I appreciate the danger of ascribing facile metaphor to illness, especially to cancer. I can become angry at the many books and acquaintances who advise one to move to northern Maine, where a hypnotic serenity presumably neutralizes the effect of sorrow and loss, to subsist on brown rice and seaweed, or "eliminate stress" from one's life (an injunction that only increases stress in me, as I become stressed by the thought of how much stress there is in my life). I am suspicious of alternative healing methods that overemphasize the "spiritual" core of physical illness and even counsel an avoidance of Western medical knowledge. My life has been saved by Western medicine, an early, relatively small cancerous tumor removed from my breast, followed by harsh chemical treatments that have hopefully destroyed any cancer cells that might have been left behind.

But there is a sense one gains irrevocably after a life-threatening illness, that the mind, or spirit, and body are indeed one, or at least in intimate communion. I believe in the reality of the spirit and that it can be hurt as well as healed. For me, that healing always involves various forms of storytelling -- the kind you recount to a therapist in that space out of ordinary space and time out of ordinary time called a "session"; the kind you write and rewrite in various formulations, experimenting with various designs; the kind you dream. It is in the perception of design that I experience healing, and if that word has been rolled around too often by shallow minds seeking instant and painless transformation so that it has lost its original power to suggest the relief of remedy, the joy of cure, I find that I still remain attached to its old-fashioned, simple promise that what is broken can, at least sometimes, be repaired.

N E X T_ P A G E: Fear of death races through me like a brush fire