[In the following review, Woodward compares A Season in Hell with Jane Lazarre's Wet Earth and Dreams, commenting that “[t]heir stories are radically different, but neither one sentimentalizes the experience of suffering.”]

The risk of breast cancer for women in the United States is one in ten by the age of eighty; one out of every 55 women will get ovarian or primary peritoneal cancer; 85 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history of the disease … We live in a culture saturated with statistics that forecast our risk for diseases and deficiencies of all kinds. For many of us, these ever-proliferating numbers—especially those that predict the incidence of cancer—have come to haunt our sense of the future. After a routine pap smear, for example, who would not respond with alarm when the doctor says she would like to make an appointment to talk about the test results?

This pervasive sense of being at risk helps us understand in part why Marilyn French and Jane Lazarre both reacted to their diagnoses of cancer with a conviction of virtual inevitability. Even before she was diagnosed, even before she was consciously fearful of having cancer, Marilyn French, at 61, found herself beginning to tell a friend of hers with lung cancer that she too had cancer. Even as she prevented herself from speaking these words, dread filled French's own chest, she tells us in A Season in Hell, a chronicle of her experience with esophageal cancer and its aftermath over a period of six years. Over the next weeks her dread grew more insistent if unspoken, a sign of the secret certainty that she had cancer. Four months later a physician pronounced the diagnosis.

For Jane Lazarre, her decades-long fear that disaster would surely befall her and those she loved was confirmed when she learned at fifty that she had breast cancer. “In the spring of 1995,” she writes in Wet Earth and Dreams, “the condition I seem to have been waiting for all my life finally struck me.” Her mother had died of breast cancer at 38; Jane was seven at the time.

How a writer begins her story of having cancer is linked to a long personal history. It is also an important artistic decision. The dramatic medical moment of diagnosis can be used to jump-start a narrative. How does Marilyn French, a novelist celebrated in particular for her 1977 book The Women's Room, begin her story? Frightening intuitions of having the disease precede her diagnosis with squamous cell cancer in 1992. The verdict leaves her in a dazed stupor that permeates the whirlwind European promotional tour for her latest book, The War against Women, that she embarks on only a few days later. She goes through the motions of her busy life stunned by anxiety and struck into confusion. She wonders if this tour will be the last time that she “would be an apparently healthy person in public.” And horribly, from the sobering perspective of six years later, she is forced to recognize that indeed that was the last time she presented herself to the world as a robust and independent individual—and that she never would again.

For a person as convivial as French, for whom a public platform and international travel are as necessary to life as writing, this is a devastating and unthinkable change. It would be for anyone. She will combat her cancer. She will fight to restore her former way of life. But her illness, and the debilitating treatments for it, teach her otherwise. Against all the odds she survives the cancer of her esophagus that has metastasized. But chemotherapy has resulted in brain damage that affects her balance, and the effects of the radiation strike unexpected parts of her body (her heart, her kidneys, her bones, the peripheral nerves in her feet). They will continue, she learns, for as long as she lives.

A Season in Hell too often devolves into a recording of the pedestrian details of everyday life (the hospital food is bad, the Berkshires are lovely). For some readers, an important and playful dimension of French's life may seem just plain weird: she belongs to a coven and her fellow witches appear from time to time with their eagle feathers and candles, incantations and wands. The disease is, however, always powerful. Hideously so. It keeps on going, even after it has been destroyed. Six months after French has been diagnosed with cancer she falls into a coma. It lasts two weeks. She loses the ability to stand up. To read. Things get better and then they get worse. She is given a new prescription for glasses and can return to her life of newspapers and books. Her heart has an attack (it is, it turns out, half gone). A therapist giving French a massage literally breaks her back, her bones are so weakened.

French, so strong in fighting spirit and blessed with a passion for life and a clarity of purpose, is aged by this illness in multiple ways. Overnight she is plagued by arthritis. She finds herself needing a walker. She develops diabetes. In her sixties, she says she feels as if she is ninety. (I know what she means, but we should remember that many ninety-year-old women are vigorous, not frail.)

It is hell and it is lasting much longer than a season. The relentless force of A Season in Hell lies in French's coming to accept that grim truth, which we as readers must acknowledge as well. For her there will be no ultimate recovery, only, hopefully, “small gains and getting through.” If the beginnings of cancer are difficult to discern, in French's case there is also no definitive end in sight. As she acknowledges, “mild impairment” is the best that she can hope for. One telling measure of this is that she finds herself six years later taking fourteen prescription medications a day (she has no insurance for this expense, which is over one thousand dollars a month). Her story will continue beyond the covers of her book.

How did she get through these first six years? Her children are devoted and so are her unfailing friends. She has a tenacious will and writing keeps her anchored to the world of meaningful work. As she tells her readers, asking for our indulgence, writing this book has also served her as a form of therapy. Perhaps most of all, she has found a way to transform her suffering, which has diminished significantly by book's end, into a state of serenity. Coming at the close of this long chronicle, this is surprising. But her words ring true. When she tells us that she is happier than she has ever been, I believe her. And I marvel at her and wish her well.

“I cannot say I am happy I was sick,” French concludes, “but I am happy that sickness, if it had to happen, brought me to where I am now. It is a better place than I have been before.” Jane Lazarre, whose last book, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memories of a White Mother of Black Sons, was published to critical acclaim, echoes these sentiments in Wet Earth and Dreams. “I would never say I am glad I had cancer,” she writes, “yet it was cancer and my stories about it that cured me of an even more obscure and enigmatic affliction.”

Lazarre begins her narrative, which takes its title from a poem by Adrienne Rich, in the recovery room after surgery for a tumor in her right breast, a room that is only one of many rooms important to her story. There is her own room, her bedroom, the room where she feels safe, the room she shares with her husband Douglas. There is the magical ordinary room that materializes in her dreams, “an unused, dusty but spacious room behind a door in my apartment, a room I had forgotten was there.” What a perfect wish-come-true for a writer—another room of one's own. And there is the cave near the beach that appears in another recurrent and disturbing dream, the wild room in which she buries her heart under wet sand, a crypt that contains memories of her mother.

Lazarre had recently been afflicted with a deepening depression, one threatening to paralyze her. For her, the recovery room takes on a meaning that is much larger than regaining strength after surgery. She requires psychic space in which to reclaim the mother she lost to cancer more than forty years before. She needs room in which to rescue the image of her mother's body as healthy and beautiful and whole so that she can repossess her own sense of the future.

Wet Earth and Dreams is more than a cancer journal, and so it seems right that Lazarre elaborates on the moment of diagnosis well toward the end of the book—after surgery, after the burning radiation treatments. There is a hardness in her right breast and, confident that it is nothing to worry about, she gets a sonogram. The radiologist decides to do a biopsy then and there, and the diagnosis is made immediately: cancer. Lazarre's reaction? She is a woman out of the ordinary, and her response reminds us of how amazingly different our stories can be. “And in that moment, standing on the street with Douglas, both of us in a kind of shock,” she writes, “my depression lifts. … I am terrified, but also energized by a kind of gathering determination I can only call hope.” The acute pressure of her illness serves her as a catalyst for seeing the distant past in a new pattern as well as for coming to terms with more recent events—the death of her brother-in-law from AIDS, the totally unexpected rejection of one of her books by a once-trusted editor, the death of her beloved therapist Gloria, also from cancer.

Lazarre is a gifted writer whose intense feelings both run deep and, like canyon rapids, shift constantly. Her account is not chronological but circles back in on itself and then spirals out again, moving by the logic of a chain of associations. The hard work of writing, of giving shape to her harrowing experience with cancer, releases the memories that were buried in the cave and readies her to accept her losses. Lazarre had remembered her mother sick with cancer and confined to her bed; now she has an earlier memory of her mother, graceful and calm, rising from the bathtub, putting on her pink bathrobe, bending down to caress her young daughter's face. It is a healing vision.

Lazarre understands the power objects can have to confer a sense of connection with those whom we have lost to death. She also understands that these objects only have that talismanic power if we are ready to accept the uncanny sense of intimacy they grant. She slips on her mother's pearls and in that simple act she draws her mother back to her again. After her therapist dies, Lazarre visits her now empty office. She sits in Gloria's chair and, finding her reading glasses nearby, puts them on, seeing herself again through Gloria's eyes. It is as if she inhabits the bodies of these two women, or as if her body echoes theirs. She is protected. She grows stronger.

Vulnerable and extremely private, Lazarre has entrusted her story to us. Wet Earth and Dreams is a moving bock, crafted with exquisite care. I feel privileged to have read Lazarre's words. And I found myself doing something out of the ordinary. Lazarre describes how a piece of music, Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A, comes to provide a space for her in which to imagine a complex psychic harmony. She listens to it over and over. I didn't recognize that piece by name, and I'm not a person who seeks out music. But I found myself ordering it, and then listening to it as I wrote, thinking of this remarkable woman whom I have never met. (It turns out that it was a familiar piece of music after all.)

Lazarre is cured of cancer, although she will remain attentive to the statistics that may shape her future. French is cured, but in cancer's place comes chronic and unpredictable bodily weakness. Both of their lives are threatened and forever changed. Their stories are radically different, but neither one sentimentalizes the experience of suffering. In the end, both memoirs impart a deep knowledge about the course of a disease—which is a social and cultural epidemic as well as an individual catastrophe—that threatened and forever changed their lives.