Zachary Andrews
Audio By Carbonatix
Colorado author Juliet Wittman’s new book, Again and Again, describes itself as “taking place in cancerland, a world where no one wants to visit.” True, at least in the flesh-and-blood world of health and illness, of suffering and triumph. But in the fictional realm? In the pages of Wittman’s latest book? It’s a welcome place to put up your feet and stay a while.
Wittman, an award-winning former staff writer for Westword who was also its theater critic for decades, as well as a contributor to the Washington Post and other outlets, is no newcomer to the publishing world; her previous book, Stocker’s Kitchen, came out a few years ago. More pertinent to this newest book, though, is her 1993 memoir, Breast Cancer Journal: A Century of Petals, which won the Colorado Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A direct line can be drawn from the experiences recounted in that book to Again and Again, which tells the story of two women and a small crew of others moving through cancer diagnoses and treatments, big causes and small crusades, salvation, love, fear and “the intense joy and vitality that can inform lives lived in the shadow of death,” according to Wittman’s website.
“It’s just a very intense period of your life,” Wittman says, speaking of her own cancer diagnosis as well as those experienced by her characters in Again and Again. “Everyone is telling you about all these books about how you can save your life. You just have to be a nice and more creative person. Eat lots of carrots. Meditate. I threw one of those books across the room after about a page.”
Beck & Branch
So Wittman wanted to write something else, a story decidedly different from the ones she found far too tossable. Her first idea was to write something comedic. “A caper,” she says, “in which a bunch of cancer patients do crazy things because what do they have to lose? But unfortunately, I’m not really a comic writer. I always go to the darker side.”
Wittman was still trying to find the right angle when she met someone who changed the course of the book. “She was a woman who’d just been diagnosed,” Wittman recalls, “very beautiful, perhaps in her thirties, and the moment I saw her, I recognized the state she was in. It’s this kind of liminal state where you’ve got no protection from the world. That was really when one of my two protagonists came into being.”
The inspiration from that chance meeting became Again and Again‘s Chloe, who departed in some radical ways from the woman Wittman met. “Characters change from their point of origin,” Wittman insists. “Chloe is only 23, a little spoiled, kind of rude, and wild and somewhat narcissistic. She just sort of took over. She’s very strong-willed.”
It’s Chloe who takes up the banner of a young boy with leukemia whose insurance won’t pay for the necessary treatments. The story spins out from that point, embracing not only Chloe’s tale, but those of others in the immediate vicinity: their triumphs and tragedies, their fears and hopes.
It might be a book set in cancerland, but it’s not a sad story. “I don’t think it’s dreary or depressing,” Wittman says. “Because these people are so full of life. Even the angry and pissy ones.”
Wittman embraces all her characters because “all your characters are you,” she says, laughing. “You couldn’t pull that person out of yourself if it wasn’t part of you.”
Even so, “no one is directly me,” she says, though the book does include “a lot of anecdotes from my life and things that I observed and people I interviewed. But as a writer, we inhabit them.”
One character in Again and Again comes closest to Wittman. “She’s older, in her sixties. She’s much calmer about the whole thing. She’s very motherly, and she’s English,” she notes. But the similarities stop there. “I didn’t marry a G.I. and come over after the war; that’s not my story. But she does miss England. Even as sick as she becomes, she at one point in the book wants to go back. So she’s probably a little bit more me.”
The detail work in most novels is something open to interpretation, of course, and entire dissertations are written attempting to contextualize those things through a certain authorial or cultural lens. But sometimes, as the saying goes, a cigar is just a cigar.
Wittman notes that in at least two of her novels, Margaret Atwood, one of her favorite authors, has a character who goes to a party where one of the rooms is painted completely black. “I remember as I read those, I thought there must be some deep meaning there,” Wittman says and laughs. “But later, when I got to interview her, I asked her about that. She said that she’d gone to a party as a graduate student and was very impressed by this black room. That was it. I think bits and pieces like that pop up in the stories we create.”
Bringing it full circle, Atwood recently chose Again and Again as one of six medically themed books to spotlight. It’s an honor that Wittman doesn’t take lightly. Being recommended by a writer who inspires you? That’s a world anyone would want to visit.
Again and again.
Juliet Wittman’s Again and Again hits shelves on Monday, May 8; she’ll read from and discuss the book at 6 p.m. that evening at Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue. For more information, see the Tattered Cover event calendar.
