BOOKMARKS; Confronting the Limits of Adult Power: Women Writers Wrestle with the Chaos of Cancer

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Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer

Edited with an introduction by Hilda Raz

Persea Books. 308 pages. ISBN 0-892-55244-1

Reviewed by Mary Pipher

In America, one in eight women will get breast cancer, and by 2000, one million women will die annually from this disease. In 1972, Shirley Temple Black was the first public figure to speak openly about having a mastectomy. Betty Ford went public in 1977 about her own cancer and raised eyebrows by encouraging women to examine their breasts regularly. In the two decades since then, little has been written about the personal experience of having breast cancer. In Living on the …