One Body: A Retrospective
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- €8.49
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- €8.49
Publisher Description
Shortlisted in Scotland’s National Book Awards
By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine had experienced period pain, childbirth, and early menopause, alongside love and laughter, a career in journalism, and raising two daughters. Like many of her peers, along the way she'd dieted, jogged, sweated, tanned, permed, and plucked—always attempting to conform to prevailing standards of "acceptable womanhood."
But when a medical crisis comes along, she can no longer pummel her body into submission and is forced to take stock. From growing up on a farm where veterinarians were more common than doctors, and where illness was “a nuisance,” she now faces the nuisance of a lifetime.
One Body is the demystifying, relatable, often hilarious, and sometimes hair-raising story of how Catherine navigates her treatment and the emotions and reflections it provokes. And how she comes to drop the unattainable standards imposed on her body, and simply appreciate the skin she is in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish journalist Simpson (When I Had a Younger Sister) movingly recounts her experience with breast cancer in this exquisite memoir. In 2018, 54-year-old Simpson visited her doctor for what she thought would be a routine mammogram, but walked out with a cancer diagnosis (which the author believes was due to hormone replacement treatment). "The cells in my right breast had turned against me," Simpson writes, "I was entering another era in the history of my body." Though Simpson and her husband were shocked by the news, they quickly adjusted to their new reality, and despite her diagnosis, Simpson refused to succumb to despair. In prose by turns witty and frank, Simpson revisits her inner and outer struggles—from the physical effects of radiotherapy to the fear of her own adult daughters one day receiving a similar prognosis—along her path to recovery. Reflecting on joining a creative writing group with others who shared her experience, Simpson affectingly muses on the paradoxical relief of entering remission: "I got stabs of both imposter syndrome (was my cancer bad enough?) and survivor guilt (why was I lucky enough to escape chemo?)." It's this candor that makes Simpson's narrative shine, providing a beacon of light and hope for readers who've been impacted by illness. In a sea of cancer memoirs, this stands out.
