Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer

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.

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.