Milkshakes and Morphine: A Memoir of Love and Loss

Genevieve Fox, MA 1987

After Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her neck, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock and heels. I can't have cancer, she thinks, I've done my hair. But there is another reason Fox can’t countenance cancer – her own mother died from the disease when Fox was nine years old, shortly after moving to England from her native New York.

She was catapulted into an unsettling, alien world and moved from place to place, with no one to anchor her. She is in no mood for history to repeat itself, or to be lost to her own young children. Fox weaves together stories of her cancer treatment with memories of her rackety, unconventional childhood.

She recalls the advert placed in The Lady for someone to care for her and her siblings, her mysterious ‘step-father’ who went AWOL, and the unfortunate woman who tried to take her mother’s place. Fox confronts her cancer with the same sassy survival instincts she used to navigate her childhood misadventures.

She draws on humour, friendship and dogged optimism to chart a course, first through tortuous treatment, and then through the unchartered territory of remission and cancer etiquette. Do you have to be a nicer person just because you have cancer? No. Is it OK to do karaoke until 4am? Yes.

In this uplifting memoir, life’s precariousness is tackled head-on – and turned on it head.

Published by Square Peg, Penguin Random House For further information, see www.Genevievefox.com 

ISBN: 1910931713