Our Cancer Year
by Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harvey Pekar, Joyce BrabnerIllustrator: Frank Stack
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1994-10-12
ISBN: 1568580118
Number of pages: 252
Publisher: Running Press
Book Reviews of Our Cancer Year
Book Review: Picking up the pieces
Summary: 5 Stars
I've always admired Joyce Brabner (I've even, truth to tell, had a bit of a crush on her). I like her writing talent, her passion for justice, her activism, her wit, her nonconformity, her looks, her scrapiness, and her determination to protect and nurture her obsessive-compulsive genius of a husband Harvey Pekar. And I love this memoir of the year in which things fell apart on several different fronts, and how Joyce picked them up. Our Cancer Year was co-written by Harvey and Joyce, but let's face it: the protagonist in the story is--and ought to be--Joyce.
Our Cancer Year has three plots going on in it. Joyce struggles to write a book about young kids around the world who work for peace; Joyce and Harvey decide to leave their rented apartment and buy a house; and Harvey is diagnosed and treated for lymphoma. In three intersecting circles, then, we see things fall apart: the trauma for the kids and Joyce's tireless (and occasionally despairing) efforts to befriend and nurture them; the hassles and unexpected emergencies that come with buying and fixing up a house; and the disruption of the quotidian when serious illness comes. The ordinary--which is, after all, Pekar's chosen metier--becomes confused, conflicted, messed up. Things fall apart.
It's Joyce's job to try to put them back together--or at least to be strong enough to help the kids and Harvey get through the storm until calmer weather returns. Her struggle to hold the center is the real story here, and it's a gripping and poignant one that actually caused tears to come to my eyes at one point (when Dana, one of the peace kids, leaves a phone message that an exhausted Joyce is too tired to pick up). Harvey's suffering, the numbness of Uri and the anger of Zamir, the insensitivity of Dr. Cantor, the sheer weariness, fear, and occasional rage of Joyce: these add to the creative tension of the story in ways that, at the end of the memoir, leave the reader emotionally exhausted but grateful for having been allowed to share this year with Joyce and Harvey.
A quick word about the artist, Frank Stack. Of all the illustrators with whom Pekar and Joyce collaborate, I have to say that I like his work least. But he was exactly the right artist for Our Cancer Year. The fluid, impressionistic style that Stack brings to the story chillingly conveys the theme of things falling apart, nothing standing still, the familiar contours going wavy. Such impressionism utterly fails to capture Pekar's obsessive-compulsive need for control, predictability, and definition, and that's why I generally don't like Stack's illustrations of Pekar's stories. But Our Cancer Year is, in part, a chronicle of the breakdown of predictability and definition. So Stack was an inspired choice.
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