CANCER IS A BITCH:
Or, I'd Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis
By Gail Konop Baker
Da Capo Lifelong Books
Publication Date: October 2008
Contact: Angela Hayes, 212-446-5104

This is a breast cancer memoir, and yet it’s so much more. In CANCER IS A BITCH, Gail Konop Baker takes the reader through her experience being diagnosed with breast cancer, getting a lumpectomy, and her recovery thereafter. The wife of a doctor, Konop Baker thought she would be ready for this, if it ever happened to her. That she could be cool, calm, and collected through a cancer diagnosis and treatment, and make it through the other side without any mental baggage. But as she finds out soon enough, it isn’t that easy. “When does the part where I become a better person kick in?,” she wonders, and struggles in the aftermath of her diagnosis with being a good mother, a good wife, and figuring out what it really is that she should be doing the life that stretches in front of her. With a remarkably observant eye and the pacing of a novelist, she captures the truly absurd and hilarious throughout her breast cancer experience, and tells the raw and honest truth about the aftermath as well. It’s heady stuff, at times sobering, and a cathartic read no matter what your personal experience with cancer might be.