A note from author Ariel Gore
Dear reader,
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among adults in the world. Billions of dollars have been spent on so-called “awareness” campaigns over the past forty years, so when my wife, Deena, was diagnosed, it surprised us that we knew almost nothing about what we could expect. We started what would become Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer as a place to gather real information and to create the space to ask all our unspeakable questions and talk about our unimaginable truths.
I talked to many other people for this book who were diagnosed with earlier stages of breast cancer, and they were all in the same boat of not-knowing. The gap in institutional support wasn’t accidental. Breast Cancer Awareness Month serves as marketing for the industry’s profit-driven entities. No one in the medical system was tasked with giving us the full picture—they served their institutions, not us.
To understand the cultural history of breast cancer, I read Audre Lorde, Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag, and Kathy Acker. I mined scientific papers and scrolled dead friends’ social media to understand drug efficacy and disease progression because doctors wouldn’t give us straight answers.
I hope you’ll check out this book and share it with your friends so that you can get some real awareness that isn’t sponsored by the drug companies. And whether or not you’ll ever deal with breast cancer, I hope you’ll think it’s a cool and interesting and funny experimental memoir—because writing is the way I process experience. Radical truth and rehearsing death are what teach me—every day—how to live; how to feel the magic of my own humanity and the power of feminist history even amid all these inhumane systems.
With love and resistance,
Ariel
About REHEARSALS FOR DYING:
An expansive, darkly funny, and deeply personal reflection on the reality of living with—and dying from—metastatic breast cancer.
Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?” These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore and her wife. As they descend into a world of doctors and tests, medications and insurance, sickness and treatments and hope and pain and more, they discover just how little they truly knew—despite the awareness campaigns and hyper-visible pink ribbons—about the reality of breast cancer. Over the four years following Deena’s terminal diagnosis, Gore does what she always does, no matter how difficult or personal the subject: she writes about it.
With keen insights, empathy, and humor, Ariel Gore braids together the story of Deena’s experience, her own role as a caretaker, narratives from others living with breast cancer, literary reflections on illness, and reportage on the history of breast cancer and the $200 billion industry that capitalizes on and profits from breast cancer screenings and treatments. Rehearsals for Dying investigates and challenges everything we think we know about breast cancer. It goes beyond awareness to knowledge, presenting a rich, nuanced, heartbreaking, and hopeful portrait of what it is to be diagnosed with, treat, and live with breast cancer in the twenty-first century.
Praise for REHEARSALS FOR DYING:
“Breast cancer is no joke, but sometimes finding the humor shifts the story into something you can tell. Rehearsals for Dying will help many.” —Tig Notaro, comedian
“I was so moved by this book—and charmed, and outraged, and devastated. Ariel Gore brings her keen wit and signature fearlessness to a story that could not have higher stakes, churning out a legit masterpiece that I could not put down. Her insistence upon radical truth and the style in which it’s told—elegant, snarky, raw, poetic—left me awed, my own humanity electrified.” —Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up
“Rehearsals For Dying is one of the most innovative and compelling memoirs exploring life and grief I’ve ever read—and I’ve read a lot of them. Ariel Gore’s observational wit and empathetic heart made this a book I read in two sittings. With a refreshing and propulsive structure, Ariel queers the grief memoir in a way I didn’t know I needed. She asks the unanswerable questions and explores the unspeakable answers.” —Chloé Caldwell, author of Women
“In Rehearsals for Dying, Ariel Gore has woven together wit, humor, poetry, and raw emotions to present the heart-wrenching truth of what it means to live with cancer as a biological and a social phenomenon, and the real cost it exacts on both its victims and their loved ones.” —Nafis Hasan, author of Metastasis
“Ariel Gore is a national treasure, and Rehearsals for Dying is a profound gift to us all. In her brilliantly bold, genre-defying manner, Gore looks head-on at the devastating loss of her beloved wife, Deena E. Chafetz, as well as the broader machinations of the patriarchal breast cancer–industrial complex. Guided by the voices of Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Lucille Clifton, Susan Sontag, and other feminist writers who’ve grappled in life and on the page with cancer and death, Gore has crafted a literary experience that is part heartbreaking tribute, part experimental memoir, part exalted homage to queer love and community, and part indictment of the violent failures of America's broken medical ‘care’ systems. Also there are recipes, because Deena Chafetz was a chef, and—despite it all!—it's really funny. Because Ariel Gore is a magician. I’m so grateful for this book.” —Kate Schatz, author of Rad Women Worldwide
“Rehearsals for Dying is stunning: highly informative, wildly crafty, and incredibly vulnerable. I marveled at Ariel Gore’s ability to weave together so many stories and threads all while remaining emotionally ferocious and tender and loving. This is a book everyone should read.” —Tomas Moniz, author of Big Familia
About the author:
Ariel Gore makes books, zines, coloring books, and tarot cards. She is the founding editor and publisher of the Alternative Press Award–winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including Hexing the Patriarchy and The End of Eve. Her shameless novel/memoir, We Were Witches, was published by the Feminist Press, and her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. She teaches writing online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen. She currently splits her time between Santa Fe and New York.