Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes-High and Low-From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and Radiation - Hardcover

Shea, Suzanne Strempek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080707246X ISBN 13: 9780807072462

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2002

Synopsis

A moving and uplifting breast cancer journal from the beloved author of Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Selling the Lite of Heaven, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a memoir rooted in truth and raw experience with a sure and compelling woman's voice. The leadlined room is the radiation therapy unit where Suzanne was treated for breast cancer. Her diary of this time is powerful and illuminating. As with Shea's acclaimed fiction, her sharp and insightful wit, her reporter's eye for the most telling and sometimes quirky details, as well as her gift and grace with metaphor and image inform every page. Shea shares her despair, indignity, and fear as well as the compassion and caring of her friends, her husband, and fellow patients. For the 192,000 women who undergo radiation for breast cancer every year, for their extended families, friends, and therapists, Suzanne Shea offers important insights. As she explores the unthinkable-the sentence of life with an often fatal illness-she traces a parallel story, that of a sixteen-year-old life guard abducted from a neighborhood park and sharing a life in limbo. It's a book full of wisdom, humor, contradiction, and ultimately, solace.

About this title

Review

"This is one of those books that changes your life forever. I am deeply grateful that I got a chance to read it, and I will recommend it to everyone I know."

"I'm not the same person I was before reading Suzanne Strempek Shea's brave, honest, enthralling, darkly funny story. I couldn't put it down, and I'll never forget its lessons about friendship and good intentions gone awry. I've loved many books, but never before have I come away with the conviction that I've just read the one that's been missing from the world."

This is one of those books that changes your life forever. I am deeply grateful that I got a chance to read it, and I will recommend it to everyone I know.--Anita Shreve, author of The Last Time They Met and Fortune's Rocks: A Novel .
"Her struggle with the realities of breast cancer-and its treatment-is a story of fear, courage, loneliness, and redemption. It is one of the most moving and important books ever written about the extraordinary pressures the disease places not only on the victim, but on family and friends as well."--Michael Carlton, Yankee Magazine
"Songs from a Lead-Lined Room contains passages of unaffected loveliness, in particular Shea's reflections on her working-class hometown in central Massachusetts, a setting cozily familiar from her novels."--Amanda Heller, The Boston Sunday Globe
"When bad things happened to a talented, insightful, witty reporter and virtuoso novelist, her notes delivered a brilliant silver lining. I'm not the same person I was before reading Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, Suzanne Strempek Shea's brave, honest, enthralling, darkly funny story. I couldn't put it down, and I'll never forget its lessons about friendship and good intentions gone awry. I've loved many books, but never before have I come away with the conviction that I've just read the one that's been missing from the world."--Elinor Lipman, author of The Inn at Lake Devine and The Dearly Departed

About the Author

Suzanne Strempek Shea, winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, and Around Again. She lives and writes in Bondsville, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080707246X
• ISBN 13: 9780807072462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 204