I was supposed to have my mammogram months before. But I was writing a new novel—and so deeply steeped in it, gunning for my deadline, that I felt I couldn’t take the time for a routine screening. Then, in February, I got a call from the hospital’s radiology department. She told me that the mammogram I’d had that previous Saturday had shown “an area of concern” in my left breast and that I needed to come back into the hospital for further imaging. The first words out of my mouth were, “Are you sure you’ve called the right person?” I was thinking: “You meant to call Alice, not me. There’s been a mistake.”Article continues after advertisement
I had just sent my new novel, The Gulf of Lions, off to my publisher. In that book, my main character, Alice, has, at the start of the book, just recovered from her husband’s betrayal and breast cancer in her left breast; in the aftermath, she takes her two daughters on a camping trip across France. While there, she starts to come back from the precipice of fear, rediscovering her sensuality and joy. Though, like all survivors, she hovers in the liminal space of never knowing if and when the cancer could come back, she forges ahead, determined to try to find some joie de vivre in her life.
