Synopsis
A moving and uplifting breast cancer journal from the beloved author of Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Selling the Lite of Heaven, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a memoir rooted in truth and raw experience with a sure and compelling woman's voice. The leadlined room is the radiation therapy unit where Suzanne was treated for breast cancer. Her diary of this time is powerful and illuminating. As with Shea's acclaimed fiction, her sharp and insightful wit, her reporter's eye for the most telling and sometimes quirky details, as well as her gift and grace with metaphor and image inform every page. Shea shares her despair, indignity, and fear as well as the compassion and caring of her friends, her husband, and fellow patients. For the 192,000 women who undergo radiation for breast cancer every year, for their extended families, friends, and therapists, Suzanne Shea offers important insights. As she explores the unthinkable-the sentence of life with an often fatal illness-she traces a parallel story, that of a sixteen-year-old life guard abducted from a neighborhood park and sharing a life in limbo. It's a book full of wisdom, humor, contradiction, and ultimately, solace.
Reviews
Novelist and former journalist Shea (Selling the Lite of Heaven) says that while she was never much of a diarist, she found writing about her experience with radiation therapy for breast cancer therapeutic. In order to help other women "who'd been in [her] boots," the author decided to publish her account of the six and a half weeks she spent going to a "lead-lined room." Her straightforward memoir reveals exactly what her radiation treatment involved: the drive to the hospital, the overly air-conditioned waiting room, her favorite technician, the hard little dish she rested her head in when she lay down in the machine, and the music she listened to through headphones to take her away from it all. She also shares her shock and anger at being diagnosed when she was a healthy 41-year-old woman who "liked [her life] the way it was" and her unwillingness to embrace the positive attitude many people demand cancer patients adopt. Though she connects with a handful of people on her own terms, Shea emphasizes her need for solitude. One person she feels akin to is Molly Bish, a teenager from her area who disappeared around the time of Shea's diagnosis; Shea weaves news of the search for Molly into her own story because she feels she has "vanished in a way as well." Yet despite Shea's candor and often poetic writing style, her memoir lacks focus and can leave the reader feeling bogged down in minor details. As Shea slogs through treatment, readers are given yet another comprehensive description of a waiting room. Nevertheless, the book is an important addition to a small but growing number of realistic cancer memoirs.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Shea starts with a song of herself: at 41, she had never smoked, walked daily in all weather, hadn't eaten meat in a decade, and drank very little. She attended church, recycled, gave to charities, and had regular mammograms. In short, she was in the best shape, physically, she ever had been. So she thought. Then, a diagnosis of breast cancer. Because of milk, she wonders, or high-tension wires, or pesticides? What with early detection, her prognosis is good. She gives us her flashback-filled diary, the account of a month-and-a-half of postlumpectomy radiation treatments administered in a lead-lined room, which she initially meant to burn after sharing only with intimates. With no lymph nodes invaded, no chemotherapy was required. Still, though painless, the weeks of daily 10-minute procedures, five days a week, brought on self-isolation and fatigue in a limbo-like state, despite her relatively easy regular life as a stay-at-home writer. Shea's journey to understanding and appreciating her overall good fortune is a self-revelation that others affected by breast cancer will value. Whitney Scott
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