Breast Cancer Novels: Why Don't Minor Characters Survive?

I’ve been encountering a new popular device for knocking off female fictional characters—you guessed it: breast cancer! It always startles me, especially if, as happened with a novel I just finished, there’s no warning, not even a mention on the back cover.

The latest read that engaged me in this experience—against my will, as once I started Vanishing Acts, I couldn’t put it down—is a startlingly good bestseller about alcohol addiction by Jodi Picoult. One of the title disappearances was dramatically performed by a minor character whom I’d been skillfully made to love, even identify with as an artist. Still, I knew. I suspected early on, when it was hinted that she had a dreadful medical condition she was resisting treatment for, what that medical condition was. And since she was not a main character, I also knew that she was doomed.

I am taken aback when I encounter one of these all-too-predictable fictional breast cancer deaths. Is it because I’ve experienced breast cancer myself? Maybe, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’ve been a voracious reader all my life—I probably recited the alphabet upon emerging from the womb—but I don’t remember breast cancer used so frequently as a tragic back story for a main character (most likely his or her mother) or a method of demise for a minor one.

I don’t mind so much when a novel is actually about breast cancer. Then I am warned, and I’ve discovered that a main character in a novel, especially if the story is narrated by her (a hopeful clue), has a pretty good chance of survival. But it seems to me there are an unusual number of those lately, too, although I've only read one of them (Good Harbor, by Anita Diamont). I checked our library system’s Web site for the subject keywords “breast cancer fiction” and found eighteen breast cancer novels, all of them published in the last ten years.

That’s fine with me, it’s a free country pretty much, and I can escape the breast cancer theme if I choose, unless of course it sneaks up on me as an unforeseen plot device. Although statistics seem more hopeful for main characters, few minor characters survive. Perhaps survival isn’t dramatic enough to carry a plot these days, but please, all you mid-manuscript novelists out there, give it to me anyway.