Synopsis
An actor recounts his marriage to Francesca Draper, their joy in becoming parents, his wife's courageous two-year battle with breast cancer, and the decision to have a child that cost her her life
Reviews
First presented as a one-man show in Los Angeles, this candid, lovingly humorous tribute to actor Linke's musician wife, "Chex," recounts the valiant, two-year battle she waged against breast cancer until her death, at age 37, in 1986. The moving narrative follows the couple's vicissitudes as the strong-willed wife, a champion of "undiluted experience," undergoes three somewhat arduous home births and surgery on a cancerous breast. Refusing post-operative chemotherapy and radiation, Chex chose a long succession of ineffective alternative treatments, from Mexican clinics to visualization. While the author, now remarried, acknowledges the strain her illness placed on their relationship, he writes that the birth of a daughter a year before Chex's death renewed their faith in each other and in the miracle of life itself.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Veteran actor Linke, best-known for the TV series CHiPS, has turned his recent one-man show and HBO drama into a poignant story of love, death, and life that goes on. Linke and his first wife, Francesca, though products of the iconoclastic 60's, were both finally ready for commitment when they met in 1976 at an L.A. party. Francesca, a musician and composer, had grown up in the East but soon moved west, where she'd become an advocate of alternative medicine and New Age beliefs--reflected in the at-home birth of the couple's first two children, both boys. Shortly after the second pregnancy, Francesca noticed a lump in her breast but sought treatment only after her mother underwent a mastectomy. The lump proved malignant and doctors advised aggressive chemotherapy, but Francesca refused. Instead, she began a lengthy, arduous quest for a natural cure based on diet and biofeedback. She visited Mexican clinics, San Francisco healers, and local practitioners--but the cancer returned. Pregnant with a third child, she refused to terminate the pregnancy as advised and gave birth at home to a daughter. But the cancer had spread to her lungs and Francesca died a year later, aged 37. This kind of story can lend itself to a wholly maudlin telling, but, to Linke's credit, he also describes candidly the reality of life and death: the relieving moments of humor in the darkest hours; his anger when, early on, Francesca seemed preoccupied with her cancer to the exclusion of everything else; and the practical difficulties of coping with death in a household with three small children. Despite a preoccupation with therapists and trends, as well as some inevitable psychobabble, Linke concentrates on the facts, his grief, and the new life that his family has built. Moving testimony from one who's been there and has found that there's a ``passage through loss to life.'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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