Writing About Cancer, by Sophia Bennett
Here’s a bit of background about how I came to write about cancer in The Look.
When I was a teenager, my younger brother was taken to hospital with … something, they weren’t sure what. But there was an infection deep in the bone and it didn’t look good. By the time they’d worked out what was wrong, his blood was toxic and the damage was getting worse. He needed an operation and his chances weren’t good. It was Christmas. The hospital consultant was so dedicated she let us stay in her own house while they operated. All I remember is that I was allergic to the Christmas tree in her living room and I was desperate not to sneeze because there was so much more wrong with the world than my inability to cope with indoor fir trees. He got better, but during that time, it was as if time stopped and we felt very, very alone.
Only one family – neighbours, but not people we knew very well – seemed to understand what we were going through. They were kind and sympathetic. They somehow knew what to say. They provided us with hot meals. They got us through. And then, a few months later, my mother told me their daughter had been diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma: a type of childhood cancer. I remember how shocked I was by that word, ‘cancer’. And even after what we’d been through, that felt worse. If any family didn’t deserve it (and of course no family does), they didn’t. I worried for years about that girl who I hardly knew, until I heard that she was well again. ‘Cancer’ seemed such a bad word that news of her recovery was a shock too although, statistically, it shouldn’t have been.
So, when it occurred to me to write about cancer in the new book I was thinking of, my brother’s illness and that girl’s diagnosis came flooding back to me. I felt (this was before ‘The Fault In Our Stars’, ‘A Monster Calls’ and ‘Before I Die’) that there wasn’t nearly enough writing about cancer for teens. It’s such a frightening issue. What happens if you’re diagnosed with it, or a friend is, or someone in your family? What do you do? What’s it like? What do you say?
I wanted to write about the effects of serious illness on a family: quite a close family – one that has a chance of pulling through. About how alone you feel, how time seems to stop, how you carry on anyway, because you have to, and how life goes on. But I didn’t want to write from the point of view of the person actually battling the disease. I suppose I was thinking about my own experience, and I wanted to capture what it’s like to be one of the people watching, desperate to help and not sure how.
I nearly didn’t have the courage to do it. Cancer is such a serious subject and I wanted to be honest and accurate and not belittle the experience – but all within the confines of a book that was written to be entertaining and educational about a totally different subject, too: modelling, fashion and discovering your creative self. It helped that someone very close had been through the same experience as Ava, the sister who gets the diagnosis, and I knew I could trust that person to tell me if I was getting it wrong. Of course I did lots of research, and got an expert in childhood cancer from a big London hospital to make sure I got the basic facts right. He could help me with the latest treatments and outcomes, but not so much with the psychology of the patients and their families. For that, I relied on some fascinating academic research and on my own experience, which was not identical, but was very similar. When The Look talks about ‘three grey faces’ in a room, those were the faces of my family.
I also relied on serendipity. One of the key scenes in the book (which I’ve spoken about elsewhere) is when Ava has to get her head shaved because of the chemo treatment. For doctors, this is quite a minor side effect, as the hair will grow back, but for patients it can be the thing they most fear. Discovering this, and knowing how central it was to the book, made me feel that I was going in the right direction.
Since the book came out in the UK, some people have written to me to tell me that it helped them cope when a friend was diagnosed with cancer. It goes into quite some details about the symptoms of Hodgkins disease, which can often be missed for quite some time. If, one day, it helps someone discover it earlier, and get treatment sooner, that will be wonderful. I’ve also had the honour of judging a hat competition at a North London school, where the winning design each year is put into production to give teenage cancer patients something cool and practical to wear.
‘The Fault In Our Stars’ is brilliant, by the way – in my humble opinion. One of my favourite books from last year, and Augustus is one of my absolute favourite characters. This is a very different story. It is not about dying of cancer. It’s about living with it and moving on.
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