Memoir of a Debulked Woman

Enduring Ovarian Cancer

By: Susan Gubar

Narrated by: Tamara Marston

A 2012 New York Times Book Review Notable Book

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen. Her memoir mines the deepest levels of anguish and devotion as she struggles to come to terms with her body’s betrayal and the frightful protocols of contemporary medicine. She finds solace in the abiding love of her husband, children, and friends while she searches for understanding in works of literature, visual art, and the testimonies of others who suffer with various forms of cancer.

Ovarian cancer remains an incurable disease for most of those diagnosed, even those lucky enough to find caring and skilled physicians. Memoir of a Debulked Woman is both a polemic against the ineffectual and injurious medical responses to which thousands of women are subjected and a meditation on the gifts of companionship, art, and literature that sustain people in need.

©2012 Susan Gubar (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

I'm grateful beyond words

It's a year after my surgery and 6 months since my last doze of chemo. I was lucky enough to keep my colon and not have a stomi, but I lost my ability to have children at 37 years (I can't even write it here without tearing up) and I'm now in menopause. I also had a drain due to an infection just when the pandemic started. I still have no words to explain how horrible the experience of a cancer treatment is. I'm usually so talkative, but this I'm silent about bc I can see how my loved ones are hurting when I try. They are so sad and scared. I discovered this book bc I really needed help to understand my sitiation. Today I struggle with crippling fatigue. When I listen to this book I understand why my body is so tired, and I try to respect and love it. I am so greateful for Susan Gubar for written this wonderful, smart and honest book. For me the cancer treatment was a existensial paradox: to live I had to undergo treatment that take away my ability to enjoy all my reasons to want to live. This book helped my deal with some of my emotions.

Insufferably self-absorbed narcissist gets cancer

I had read two memoirs about ovarian cancer...Liz Tilberis' and Gilda Radner's. Both excellent with Tilberis' maybe being a bit better in my mind in the sense that she is more likable than Radner, even though I was a huge Radner fan.

(I am very interested in medical topics generally.)

Unfortunately, this author is a self absorbed narcissist who spends 99 percent of the book pitying herself...the book is a litany of complaints and feeling sorry for herself on every subject imaginable: people's comments when trying to talk about her cancer aren't what she wants even when they are trying to be helpful--so she mocks them; her doctors can do no right, the procedures are painful, she'd rather die than do surgeries and chemo because she shouldn't have to subject herself to this--but then she does them and just complains about every imaginable aspect, she hates her mother, why does her elderly mother keep asking her to do things? Etc. She notes that the word chemotherapy contains the word, "mother", and has nothing but terrible things to say about her. (Her father apparently died by suicide.)

She also spends most of the book name dropping various authors and books, which seems snobbish and distracting.

The other thing about this book is that as of fall of 2021, the author is still alive, which makes her constant self-pitying about why she has to do chemo and subject herself to surgical procedures when they can't even cure her, seem that much more insufferable and obnoxious...her doctors bought her many more years. Years for which many people would be profoundly grateful.

There's one small portion of a chapter towards the end when she expressed some gratitude, but it's like a drop of rain in the desert, and evaporated as quickly, before she began complaining again.

Sometimes she acts like she is an advocate for medical research in ovarian cancer, but the book always immediately lapses into self involvement.

I finished it, but it was difficult.

I wish her well in her prognosis, but I would never read anything of this woman's again.