Miriam Engelberg: My “Shallow” Hero

This week I read Miriam Engelberg’s breast cancer memoir titled Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics, and fell in love. Engelberg’s book is about as opposite from Cancer Vixen (another graphic memoir I’ve reviewed) as it could get and still be a graphic memoir about breast cancer.

I loved Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s spunky story in Cancer Vixen, as well as her professional, super-hero full-color art. But I also loved Miriam Engelberg’s clumsy black-and-white pen drawings and sloppy print. Both authors were struck with cancer while fairly young, but their stories are very different.

While Marchetto, a single New York successful artist dates (and, in the book, marries) a hot Italian restaurant owner, Engelberg is married, works for a small company doing computer work, and has a child. Her cancer is not in her nodes and after surgery (it wasn’t clear to me what kind), a full course of chemo and radiation, her prognosis is good. She loves to draw, so she journals her experience in comic strips.

Three years pass, during which Engelberg shares her honest and unsparing wonderings and thoughts. She deals with the “But you look so good!” response from people who find out she has breast cancer, something I’ve never known how to deal with (I should look half dead?). She confronts way people don’t share their problems much any more, because her Big C makes them seem trivial, or because they don’t want to burden her. She, as I, finds these responses isolating.

Meanwhile, Engelberg sets the “Cancer Sucks” team against the “Pink Ribbon” crew, suggests a late-night cancer channel, explores causes that include eating cheese, finds something possibly deadly in everything in the supermarket.

But Engelberg’s thoughts turn even more ironic when her cancer metastasizes—every survivor’s nightmare—in her bones, and then in her brain. (“When does a survivor stop being a survivor?”) Only the brave need read further.

Or those of us who can’t stop turning the pages. We have to know what happens. We have fallen in love our brave “shallow” hero—her honesty and sharp/gentle humor, never mean, never false. After her book is published by Harper’s in 2006, then what? What has happened to her?
The book did not say and I had to know. I googled Miriam Engelberg: I found her Web site, saw her picture, read her blogs, and cried.