Main description:

Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the dramas and delving into the science. Stern also nudges cancer off center stage by turning to alternative obsessions and pleasures. In seductive writing she describes her life in the garden and kitchen, the hospital and the library, and her travels-down the street to her meditation center, across the border to Mexico, and across the world to Australia. Her immediate world is inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales, lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly.

Contents:

Acknowledgments ix
1. Chickens Saved My Life 1
2. The Time It Takes (By Way of an Introduction) 3
3. Secret 7
4. A Possum Fate (Averted) 9
5. Events Unfold in the Snow 12
6. Chicken Feet 17
7. Why Chickens or Homage to Gloria 18
8. Boomerang 22
9. A Way of Making Another Egg 25
10. Shivers and Shakes 28
11. The Chicken or the Egg 32
12. Strawberry/Fetish 34
13. Life after Life 40
14. The Poetry of Pigs 44
15. Some Musings on Metaphor 45
16. Tricking the Body 51
17. Chicken Joke 53
18. Nice Paint Job 57
19. Frenzied Calm 59
20. Tokhm-e Morgh 73
21. Disability 74
22. Why Me, Lord? 75
23. Five Down, Two to Go 80
24. The Warrior Song of King Gesar 81
25. Euphoria 85
26. A Fern Romance 87
27. Weeding 89
28. Untimely 92
29. Blue/Shimmer 93
30. Missed Connection 109
31. Blown through the Air 111
32. Don't Think about It (For the Moment) 114
33. Spheres of Glass 115
34. Purple Haze 123
35. Cantankerous Rooster 125
36. Dead and Alive: A Tenuous Continuum 128
37. Breakfast Anecdotes 138
38. Landscape 139
39. Tootin Pootin 143
40. Dragon Inn 150
41. All along the Highway 153
42. A Lion's Roar 156
43. The Ecology of Cancer, and What Do Ants Have to Do with It? 158
44. What Does It Matter? 164
45. So Unctuous and So Tender 166
46. Dorland 169
47. Touched by a Whale 174
48. Travel 181
49. The Answer Is Not Coming 182
50. Night Club Bouncers 184
51. All Natural 187
52. Anza Borrego 190
53. Lighten Up 197
54. Glad to Be Here (Plaintive Knowledge) 203
55. Stinging Nettles 205
56. A Talent for Cancer 212
57. Phobia: The Chickens Come Home to Roost 214
58. Walking Meditation 219
59. A Ticket for Tuppence 221
60. Reaching Yirrkala 226
61. Chookless 245
62. Chicken Shit 246
63. Mimetic Pain 250
64. You Are Mostly Not You 254
65. R.I.P. Elvis, the King of the Cats 260
66. Afterlife 263
67. Art Alive 268
68. Bodies in Pieces 271
69. A Prospect of Consolation 275
70. Fig Future 278
71. Between Fresh and Rotten 280
72. Blood Poetry 294
73. Shimmer and Glimmer 295
74. I Need an Advocate 297
75. Nameless 302
76. Fermentation Dreams 306
77. The Structure That a Life Has 309
78. Like a Cat in a Hat, Sleek and Brave: R.I.P. Ryoko 311
79. The Malvolio Gene 314
80. What Do You Expect? 318
81. Chimera 320
82. The Last Chicken Standing 335
83. Arrivderci 338
Notes 343