In 2005, Tania Katan released My One-Night Stand With Cancer, a book that follows a time in her life when she was diagnosed with breast cancer – twice, 10 years apart. While this sounds like an extremely depressing read, it is funny, sad and sweet and comes highly recommended by yours truly.
Tania Katan writes with a lot of humour about the trauma of having and treating breast cancer, about chemotherapy, mastectomies and her friends and girlfriends along the way.
Her relationships with women, the good ones as well as the bad ones, are also an important topic in this book she approaches with a lot of humour and honesty. “I took note of the red flag,” she writes at one point about a girl she was about to date, “but I also noted that I was ready to be in a relationship–and there is nothing more powerful than being ready.”
It’s nice to read a book that’s not angsty about sexuality and that gives such a positive view of gay life. Katan also shows in the course of her book that you can be loveable and you can be loved, even with a body that isn’t perfect, even when you’ve got tubes sticking out of you after a gruelling operation.
In February 2019, Tania Katan wrote another book called Creative Trespassing and she’s giving exceptional speeches, like this one at Google, that might give you a bit of insight into the type of humour that awaits you with My One Night Stand With Cancer. To find more about her, you can find her website here.
Verdict
Get My One-Night Stand With Cancer for a unique and funny look at what it’s like to suffer through breast cancer and for a look at life as a lesbian in the 90ies and beyond.
