Amazon CANCER IS A B_TCH Category:  Memoir Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books ISBN-10:  0738211621 Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 272 Copyright: 2008 ISBN-13: 9780738211626 A raw, intimate, brutally honest and often funny account of my brush with breast cancer and its intersecton with motherhood, marriage and midlife.

Publishers Weekly
Baker, a former columnist for the online magazine Literary Mama living in Madison, Wis., is busy on her novel-with a protagonist she happens to have diagnosed with breast cancer-when real life intervenes. Shocked by a diagnosis of breast cancer herself, the 45-year-old mother of three begins a yearlong struggle to combat and comprehend the turn her life has taken. Baker and her radiologist husband trek to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Though her cancer has not metastasized and she's spared chemotherapy and radiation, Baker nevertheless faces the fear that the disease may return. As Baker grapples with the demands of motherhood and marriage, she also begins a relentless search to find the cause of her disease and head off its recurrence in the future-turning to organic foods, whipping up batches of organic face creams in her kitchen and avoiding electromagnetic fields. In this heartfelt memoir, Baker proves to be both humorous (she compares waiting for her follow-up mammogram results to a "call back" for an acting audition) and compassionate, as when a friend is diagnosed with colon cancer. (Oct.)

Miami Herald
Fateful words at a medical procedure
A columnist tracks her year-long battle with breast cancer.
BY CHRISTINE THOMAS

CANCER IS A BITCH. Gail Konop Baker. Da Capo. 261 pages. $22.

When Wisconsin writer Gail Konop Baker heard the words every woman dreads -- 'I think we should biopsy' -- she was at her annual mammogram and had ironically just about finished writing a novel about a woman who searches for meaning after finding a lump in her breast. But while her agent rejected the novel because she didn't 'really care whether the protagonist has breast cancer or not,' as Baker's life mimics fiction a more powerful plot develops, one chronicled in Baker's unflinchingly intimate new memoir.

Based on her column in Literary Mama and packed with razor-sharp humor and raw confessions, the book traces her year-long battle with breast cancer begun at age 46, when she was watching out for the expected midlife crisis and focused on negotiating her oldest daugh-ter's college application process, younger children's growth and balancing her marriage. Though she was healthy as one could be -- a doctor's wife, runner and yoga practitioner who ate organic and watched her toxin intake -- her life is transformed by illness, tests, long waits for results, surgery, deep ruminations about meaning and death, all while juggling a daily life that won't stop and a breast that won't behave.

The antithesis of a victim's tale, Baker's unaffected account welcomes readers on the rollercoaster of coping with the disease and living with 'the responsibility of being `The Woman Who Had Breast Cancer.' ' Painful questions are never sugarcoated, whether considering having a mastectomy to get 'rid of the time bombs' as Baker calls her breasts or thoughts about who her husband might end up with and what her kids would do without her.

No concern is dismissed as too trivial, such as realizing the upside of being able to become a medical marijuana pothead or the funny then heartbreaking reality when '[i]t strikes me that I'll never go topless in Nice. Never be a stripper. Never pose for Playboy. And now I want those choices back.' Each detail underscores the everyday realities of the loss she faced and eventually escaped.

Today, one in eight women are likely to develop breast cancer, and so Cancer is a Bitch offers a humorous yet frighteningly relevant glimpse into an experience too many women will face. But even if the disease has not touched your life, Baker's story resonates with a portrait of just how quickly, and how often, life teeters off balance -- and how in one morning everything else except living and loving ceases to matter.

Christine Thomas is a writer in Hawaii.

Library Journal
Wannabe author Baker wrote a novel about a woman who develops breast cancer. Shortly thereafter, the 45-year-old Wisconsin wife and mother was diagnosed with DCIS and underwent a lumpectomy. Cutting, crafty, and clearly a woman on a mission, Baker takes us along as her life turns upside down in so many ways. No graphic treatment specifics here, but an honest (and very funny, for the most part) approach to breast cancer. For all patient health collections.