I was talking to a friend of my brother's last night, who's an actor, and he said that the one thing that is true among all people is that they all want to be special. And that's completley true. So when I was reading a review of a book in the New York Times of the Book, "Janet and Me" I was very taken with a line from the reviewer, Joyce Johnson: "''A Story of Love and Loss''? How often have we heard that one? As if all human tragedy is becoming Oprahized, memoirs of disease and dysfunction endlessly appear on publishers' lists. Personally, I refuse to equate memoir writing with therapy; nor do I believe that it rewards one with transcendence." As an aside, she does say that the book got to her.

"How often have we heard that one?" So many times because it's not simply a story of a single couple's struggle with cancer but it's now become part of the human condition. We all want to believe that our struggles are unique while at the same time searching for the commonalities so that we have someone to relate to. Though the treatments and the side effects can be pretty much standard, there are still so many ways, that each diagnosis, each day, each "dealing with it" is different. There are some of us who are blessed to have the chemo work; others who stare at their collapsed veins wondering why if they were willing to poison their bodies to get better that the sacrifice wouldn't be enough to get well. Some who pick up and move on; some who can never seem to shake the trauma of being diagnosed. Some who seem to have found every single good person on this planet to be their friend or relative and are constantly surrounded by love and support; some who find themselves lost and alone. Some of us can walk around and proudly wear our survival in a yellow band around our wrists; and there are others who are ashamed, feeling that this has tarnished who they are and hide their disease like a bad test grade. I don't think that anyone diagnosed with cancer is lucky, there are just different degrees of unluckiness. No that's not pessimism--that's just well, realism.

Ms. Johnson gives a quick thought about transcendence, and her lack of regard for this being valid. This notion that being sick somehow gives you a new vision into the world at large. Ha! As if that's at all true. Movies would love for us to believe that due to the fact that we've become afflicted with something horrible we will be rewarded with some type of knowledge the rest of our brethren don't have (cue the Lifetime music). But well, it's probably more along these lines. Shall I remind everyone of a very memorable quote by the hilarious Bill Murray in Caddyshack:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald... striking. So, I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one - big hitter, the Lama - long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga... gunga, gunga-galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Unfortunately for this reviewer, who may feel that the stories that get to the heart of the human condition can only be told by those great writers who can weave a fiction tale around words and schemes that the "ordinary" person is far too well, ordinary to convey, human tragedy has become Oprahized. Not because it's just than any old hack can write something about their life, but because disease and dysfunction has become so prevalent. We search for the discrepancies that give us the stories but they top the best seller lists because everyone has been touched. Or if the story is far to terrible to even imagine happening (i.e. Augusten Burroughs) then people will say "that boy was far more unlucky than me" but at least he got to write a bestselling novel about it. When you're fighting for your life, or fighting to die with dignity, you are not thinking that there is some critic out there who is going to call your specific story banal. Because when it's your struggle, your fight, your body writhing in pain, there is nothing that ordinary about it.