![]() One character in Again and Again comes closest to Wittman. “You couldn’t pull that person out of yourself if it wasn’t part of you.”Įven 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. Wittman embraces all her characters because “all your characters are you,” she says, laughing. “Because these people are so full of life. “I don’t think it’s dreary or depressing,” Wittman says. It might be a book set in cancerland, but it’s not a sad story. 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's Chloe who takes up the banner of a young boy with leukemia whose insurance won’t pay for the necessary treatments. “Chloe is only 23, a little spoiled, kind of rude, and wild and somewhat narcissistic. “Characters change from their point of origin,” Wittman insists. The inspiration from that chance meeting became Again and Again’s Chloe, who departed in some radical ways from the woman Wittman met. That was really when one of my two protagonists came into being.” It’s this kind of liminal state where you’ve got no protection from the world. “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. ![]() Wittman was still trying to find the right angle when she met someone who changed the course of the book. “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. Her first idea was to write something comedic. I threw one of those books across the room after about a page.”īeck & Branch So Wittman wanted to write something else, a story decidedly different from the ones she found far too tossable. You just have to be a nice and more creative person. “Everyone is telling you about all these books about how you can save your life. “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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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