A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles: A True Story of Love, Science, and Cancer Hardcover – April 26, 2016

Author and Salon.com senior staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams has just released a most amazing book. It tells the story of her diagnosis and treatment of stage four malignant melanoma over the course of two years. Cancer memoirs today are – unfortunately – a dime a dozen, but this book is about as far from the “I-fought-my-courageous-battle-with cancer-and-heroically-beat-it” formula as you can get. Instead, we readers get a superbly written and very human view of what maintaining a life and a family in the face of probable death looks like. It contains a wealth of medical information around the emerging use of immunotherapy as the first truly new treatment for cancer in a hundred years, presented in easy to understand plain English.Her story takes us through the traumas of surgery, recovery, and recurrence, and relates the loss of friends and the difficulty of holding a family together, but it is the author’s deft and frequent use of humor that got this reader through this troubling tale. Her humor is as natural and insightful as it is pervasive throughout. It should be noted that this book is for everyone, whether or not cancer has touched your life.As a person who has – so far – survived a cancer diagnosis whose preliminary prediction was for a 5% chance of three-year survival, I feel a unique bond as she shares the cringe worthy details of the cancer experience from both a physical as well as emotional point of view. As I read through this book, the word that kept popping up in my head was “honest.” We are presented with a brand of honesty that is so direct, unassuming, and shameless as to be almost painful.Those of you who are already familiar with Ms. Williams writing will know that she is particularly adept at writing pithy endings to her articles, and without spoiling, let me just say she knocks this ending out of the park.Finally, I have two pieces of advice: buy this wonderful book, and go with the jumbo box of tissues.

Fair haired little redhead girl struck down by aggressive and invasive melanoma in the prime of her life. Mary Elizabeth takes us into her life so that we can truly understand her plight, her massive amount of tImes she's been stuck with needles for check her blood, all the while she makes this gruesome journey I am pulling for her to stomp out this nasty vicious bitch. Thank you for participating and walking with faith into that treatment room time and again. One does this for themselves and their families but for those they don't know and will never know. As one redhead to another, thanks for contributing to science to the rest of us pale gingers. Read this in good health~ And thanks.

Would I have picked up Mary Elizabeth Williams' A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles if she wasn't a friend of mine, whose cancer diagnoses and "complete response" to treatment I'd observed with wonder from far across the country? If she hadn't been one of my late husband's first and best online friends? If she hadn't spoken so beautifully at his memorial? I'd like to think that her honest, lovely NY Times Modern Love article about rediscovering love with her estranged husband in the midst of her cancer diagnosis would have piqued my interest and made me buy it regardless.Is generous a word people use about memoirs? Because that is the word that best describes the book for me. Mary Elizabeth doesn't flinch when she describes the raw emotion that blindsided her time and again, from her own diagnosis and recurrence of cancer, to the losses of her close loved ones, through physical pain and uncertainty and frightened children and even the gross stuff like oozing wounds and a horrifically timed (shudder) lice outbreak. She is beyond generous to let us into her thoughts and feelings, a beacon to anyone going through similar trials.But it's not all gloom and doom, as the spoiler that opens the book proves. She lived.There is humor in here, so much of the humor that helped her and her husband and her best friend retaliate against the onslaught. There's fascinating research about the immunotherapy treatment that saved her, its history, and the doctors who are pushing it forward. And there's so much wisdom and insight. I dog-eared many pages to refer back to, to words that brought me, a widow with two children struggling to get through day after day, a lot of comfort.There's one passage early in the book that took my breath away, because it mirrored my own experience in grief counseling. It happens just a couple of days after Mary Elizabeth's cancer diagnosis. "I'm already grieving for the person I was on August 10. Her unquestioning ability to plan things far in advance, her unshakeable certainty of her own future existence, her ability to walk down Broadway on a bright summer day with no hat and no fear. She was obliterated in the span of a phone call. I wish I'd had a chance to say goodbye."There's a reason they call them "life-changing experiences". When our lives are changed, we are changed. We miss like hell the person we used to be. We hate it, but we have to deal with it and get on with the business of living. Mary Elizabeth Williams teaches us that we can do that with humor, with grace, and with love.

I adored this book. As a recent survivor, I related to so many parts in it. She writes so easily and well about her personal experiences and because of her background in journalism, I know she did proper research on the more medical aspects that came her way.She has a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor with her husband and friends. We ride her ups and downs with her and are happy for her good fortune at surviving at a time when few people ever survived her kind of cancer.I hope this book has been able to inspire others to try clinical trials if it is suggested as an option for them. Like Mary Elizabeth, my life too has been extended by entering a clinical trial. A very special book on a very specialized topic.

Said everything I feel & experience about stage 4 melanoma and immunotherapy - but funnier, with more insight and love than I ever expected. Loved it.

I am currently in Mary Elizabeth's shoes and this book has given me information I haven't been able to get a hold of before but also, more importantly, hope.

A practical guide of what to expect on such occasions