It’s a virtuosic half-paragraph, a feat of tonal control that is amplified by the pleasingly plainspoken Texan almost-drawl of audiobook narrator Jennifer Teague, whose delivery radiates the complicated stew of virtues Wisenberg’s prose offers all at once: Sassy intelligence, social conscience, humor, feminist willfulness and indignation at the stream of reductive corporate can-do logic and self-help wall-poster language that patients must endure daily alongside their cancer.

The audiobook begins not with an author note, but with a section titled “About the Bitch,” a name chosen not for the author’s bitchy qualities, but rather because the blog that preceded it “should be called Cancer Something, and Babe was too young and Vixen was already taken.” Then, this news: “No animals were harmed in the production of this book except a few mice, and they were home invaders.”

Continue Reading...