Cancer Vanquished Graphically
Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto provides another stunning example of the power of the Graphic Novel. I loved this book. Right up there with Stitches by David Small (reviewed on this blog) and the Persepolis books by Marjane Satrapi, Cancer Vixen conveys through vivid drawings, straightforward commentary, and genuine dialogue, the harsh experience of a very difficult situation — and makes all readers participants in the story. I experienced cancer through my sister’s diagnosis, treatment, and death, but Cancer Vixen deepened my knowledge of what is suffered, what is feared, and what is hoped for. As in Stitches and the Persepolis books, the story told is very personal and yet its ramifications are universal. Family dysfunction and political dysfunction are exposed in those books: Cancer Vixen exposes both the bland and the horrific aspects of cancer.
As in other graphic novels, many of Marchetto’s drawings involve faces looking straight at the reader and the dialogue is often directed towards the reader. The result is an engagement between the reader and the story that feels personal and also special, as if Marchetto is sharing an intimate confidence. It helps that Marchetto is a very likable person, a woman struggling to find her place in the world while also trying to have a good time, make a living, and be a decent person. We like her and when she takes us in and makes us witness to the diagnosis of cancer and the aftermath of its treatment, we care; we care a lot. Marchetto shares her story as a one-on-one conversation, a personal saga shared between two friends, and we are grateful for the conversation.
While providing details about diagnosis and treatment that illuminate the common experience of cancer, Marchetto also provides us with context of what having cancer meant to her personally through flashbacks to life “b.c.” (before cancer). She offers up her history as a young, carefree, and skinny fashionista brought horribly down to earth by September 11th. The World Trade Center destruction happened literally in her back yard and she recorded her personal experience of September 11th for Talk magazine. Reproduced here, it is a heartbreaking recording of the horrors of that day. Three years later, when Marchetto is in love with a wonderful man and selling cartoons and happy again (although never happy-go-lucky again) cancer strikes. Drawn as a skinny bitch in a gray hooded mantle, Cancer is death-come-calling but Marchetto is determined to fight back, and fight hard.
Marchetto uses humor and bitter truth to illustrate, through both words and drawings, her experience of cancer, and it is a triumph when she succeeds in fighting back death. There are costs to her battle (babies in the universe of her future disappear, one by one) but there are also lessons gained — and shared with us, her devoted confidants — about love, friendship, maintaining perspective, and never, ever taking anything for granted.
