Fred D'Aguiar, _Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020_

FIVE YEARS AGO, just about to the day, I got my prostate cancer diagnosis. I had surgery the following April, and it was successful--no sign of recurrence so far, knock wood. 

In 2017-18 there was plenty to read about prostate cancer, but it was of the practical variety, How to Survive Prostate Cancer, and so on. Useful, obviously, but as a reading kind of person I was hoping for something like Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals or Anne Boyer's The Undying--i.e., something about the experience of having it written by a person who could really write.

I wanted this book, basically, and now here it is. 

D'Aguiar is a novelist and poet, "born in London to Guyanese parents," as it says in the jacket copy. He grew mainly with his grandparents in Guyana, came back to England a a young man, and has been resident in the USA for quite a while; he teaches creative writing at UCLA. I haven't read any of his books before this one, although I have seen occasional pieces by him in Conjunctions. 

It's not a practical guide sort of book--it does not explain what your Gleason score means, for instance, or how laparoscopic surgery is performed, or how to obtain an erection with a vacuum pump, or anything of that sort. 

It's excellent, though, on all the topics that the practical guides ignore. What is it like to have a potentially mortal illness that has no symptoms--to have a hostile familiar dwelling inside you that you know about only because a doctor has told you that you have it? What is it like having the operation that will deal this hostile familiar, an operation that will utterly change the circumstances of your life, but during which you will  be perfectly unconscious, after which you will  have no memories? How do you manage the three months before they check your PSA again, the three months during which you will not know whether the operation made a difference for not? 

D'Aguiar had the added fillip of going through all this during the COVID lockdown months. I did not have  to deal with that, praise the Lord. But reading this book was like reliving one of my life's strangest episodes. I never thought of myself as a "cancer survivor," but I did have cancer, and I am still here, so I guess I am one, and this book was what I needed to get me to shake hands with that identity.