Lipstick And A Crooked Smile Can't Hide Vivisector's Scars
Sun Herald
Sunday September 2, 2007
Lessons In Taxidermy
Bee Lavender(Hachette Livre, $22.95)THERE was a song in the '90s by a proto-emo singer/songwriter named Lisa Germano, called Cancer Of Everything, a sardonic ballad about metastasising neurotic angst. Bee Lavender's Lessons In Taxidermy shares Germano's wryness and darkness, but in this case, as the author baldly relates in this bruising memoir, the phrase is not metaphoric: she really did have cancer, or some kind of disease, of almost everything.Lavender's is one of those lives that seem literally incredible in its cascade of calamities. The story opens with agonising pain in the present; there's little respite as we go back to the childhood, mercilessly riven by successions of painful diseases and equally traumatic therapies. We are reading about a very vulnerable person indeed. She is always on the outside: "When I walk through a large crowd people move swiftly out of my way," she writes.What Lavender describes, however, is a child who resents being made class valedictorian out of pity, who vomits through the metal cage holding her jaw together but doesn't cry; "the sick kid, the weird kid, the outcast" who coldly threatens to kill a boy who mocks her scars. The medical-misery-memoir is a winning genre. Marry the visceral gratification of a real-life story, some exotic and vilely debilitating disease, the schadenfreude and an exultant triumph allowing the book to be penned after all the drama, and you have a phenomenon that fills at least two shelves of the airport bookshop's biography section.For those who have been seriously ill, there is potentially comfort in sharing trench tales; for the lucky others, a prurient fascination with what happens when the physical self falters but the mind survives to observe.Inga Clendinnen's account of her liver disease and subsequent transplant, Tiger's Eye, is a marvellously unsentimental and genuinely shocking (and curious) insight into the sheer terror, fatigue, and normalising of devastating illness. Lessons In Taxidermy shares this unsentimentality, almost to a fault, as well as humour, candour and well-merited survivor pride as it documents catastrophic assaults by disease.Her charmingly arcadian name is the least of the notable things about Lavender. Inside the front cover of the book is an author photo, and, as one reviewer noted, we are compelled to flick back and stare at it more and more often as we learn of what the radiant smile signifies. It shows an attractive, perky woman with glasses, crooked front teeth and heavy lipstick. She looks normal enough but within the pages we learn to decode the features of her face in a new light.The cats-eye glasses cover eyes that gave the child Bee dramatic double vision for years; the crooked front teeth are lucky survivors from "virulent, destructive, mystifying" cysts on her jaw that made the bone brittle enough to shatter.The lipstick and pancake make-up are cover against the sun, which ravaged her with hundreds of skin cancers that needed to be systematically burnt away. Plus there was the thyroid cancer at 12, which necessitated surgery that nearly decapitated her, the horrific car accident that smashed her bones and nearly killed two friends, the ... Well, it's hard to recall all the things this woman suffered.The names of diseases are not so important in this memoir. What it tells, in pages of meticulous prose, is a story about pride, dignity, steely resistance, and a kind of stomach-clenchingly resolute self-knowledge.Lavender's tone is not always comfortable. She was, and remains, angry - not just about her body's suffering, but about the way she was treated by medical professionals as time after time she is admitted to emergency wards, operating theatres, specialists' surgeries, forced to repeat her inconceivable medical history, being told that she's making up her symptoms, that she's exaggerating or she's attention-seeking, that she's wrong; or that she must be brave, must undergo tests, must steel herself for the next operation.Fury and frustration seethe on these pages. She throws away painkillers, rides out the agonies in search of self-agency. Taciturn and fiercely independent in young adulthood, Lavender fights for a kind of brutalised dignity. Her face in the photo is of a bright, friendly person, but the spirit found in these pages is rather more complex, and at times disquieting."I have a strict and repressive code of conduct for myself, and I will not fight, nor debate, nor will I even speak to people who might cause me to fall down again," she says. It is not surprising that under the onslaught of calamities she hardens; scar tissue accretes inside and out. It is her unstained candour and courage that keep us close to her."I want to be healthy, even if I'm just pretending," she tells a doctor at one point. But pretence isn't really Lavender's style. The language of Taxidermy is measured, often deftly beautiful, always economical. There is something shifting uneasily beneath the skin of this memoir; sometimes we are kept distant, other times brought horrifyingly close to her agonies, but the dissection is done with steady hands, clear focused eyes, and no apologies.
© 2007 Sun Herald