“I want to be brave. I want to be big. I want to be gracious and cool. I want to be the Audrey Hepburn of cancer. ”

“When I was in college, the board game RISK was popular for a while. We’d get stoned and I’d stare at the little plastic pieces moving across the territories and get utterly confused about allies and enemies, arguing that nothing could be that black and white, complicating the whole notion of the game. But I understand that estrogen is my enemy now, the very thing that made me big-busted and fertile and a terrific nurser, has turned on me, inside my milk ducts where my body incubated nourishment that made my babies pink cheeked and roly-poly thighed. It’s all so twisted and ironic and confusing. Tamoxifen, a hero and a hazard, my breasts, a giver and taker of life, and I, the protagonist and the antagonist in this story”

“I’ll start in the middle: Winter 2006:I’m sitting topless in the oncologist’s office on Valentine’s Day. Cancer is a bitch. It doesn’t give a shit about holidays.”

“When does the part where I become a bigger person kick in?”

“I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what was on my mind.”

“It’s not that I wanted to die . I just wanted to go to sleep for long enough for my life to find some meaning again.”

“What I really wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them.”