Milkshakes and Morphine: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Genevieve Fox
Valerie Grove
Milkshakes and Morphine: A Memoir of Love and Loss By Genevieve Fox Square Peg £14.99 Oldie price £11.65 inc p&p
A lump appears in her neck, ‘bigger than a pea, smaller than a Malteser’: so Genevieve Fox’s memoir begins. Straight to Dr Google. Is it a cyst , a goitre or thyroid cancer? Might it just be the stress of moving house and acquiring a Schnauzer puppy, Pepper?
Fox is a busy journalist and mother – as her lamented colleagues, Ruth Picardie and Cassandra Jardine, were. Each was suddenly diagnosed with cancer, and dead within a year or two.
Has everybody got cancer? Fox asks, reasonably. Her initial anxiety is that, if she should die soon, she has not yet given her two teenage boys the essential life lessons they need, to live by. Being ‘vain, shallow and moved by my own mortality’, she must quickly trawl through her ‘poetry jukebox of a head’ and supply aphorisms, mantras and words of wisdom from her bountifully stocked mind.
What fathomless depths of despond, what mountain peaks of euphoria now open up to her, on ‘Planet Cancer’. And what self-reproach too: ‘Cancer is supposed to make you a better person. I have slipped under the net.’ Rage, indignation and humiliation make her callous, repelling sympathy from strangers: ‘I cut her with my razor eyes.’ In the Macmillan Cancer Centre, she recoils from a fellow patient who says ‘toilet’. She is not ‘cancer-nice’. ‘Being nice all the time would be easier, but impossible.’
Her cancer diary runs parallel with a memoir of her childhood, punctuated by loss: her American father, her mother’s remarriage and, in her teens, her mother’s death from cancer. In orphanhood, Fox identifies with literary orphans, from Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, via Ian Mcewan’s The Cement Garden. She and her two siblings make an odd household. Their salvation is having money. A housekeeper is advertised for: ‘Three recently orphaned children, bright and rewarding, need a female 30-50 to make a home for them.’ Some responses are hilarious. Alan Bennett, Fox muses, ‘would hang moving monologues off these... dimwits and losers’.
Her older half-brother is James Fox, the investigative reporter and author. He arranges a tour to New York, Los Angeles and several grand houses between, visiting their well-connected, distinguished, philanthropic relations. Thus we piece together the puzzle of who is Genevieve? The answer is exhilarating. She is like an Edith Wharton heroine, with entrées everywhere. America gives her ‘a handy narrative that I have called upon ever since’.
But her narrative now is ruled by the deadly submandibular tumour, a squamous cell carcinoma, just 2cm by 2cm. Even though she has an angelically domesticated husband, she must discover that illness brings loneliness. ‘Unseemly sickness, like need, pushes people away.’ Anxious at first about her home being scrutinised by droppers-in – ‘I wish I were tidy and mature and lived like a fully-fledged grown-up’ – she permits a makeover, and becomes devoted to her white room with her white bed.
Not everyone makes a good cancerfriend. Some have enough on their plate, or are already a carer, or have recently been someone else’s sickness buddy. They tell her, ‘You’ll be fine.’ Some say cancer is ‘a blessing’. Others suggest gurus and healers at £150 an hour. Raised a Catholic, she even tries a Jesuit ‘workshop on silence’ at Farm Street. Nothing helps.
Eventually the appalling time arrives when she cannot chew or swallow. There are boils, ulcers and scabs. The progress of her cure brings nightmares, a Boschian hell. Her PEG – percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy – makes her scream, writhe and spew diabolic green bile. This former foodie loses all appetite or taste. Her infantile diet of gloop and milkshakes reveals the bleak functionality of ‘food without a social context’. She swigs morphine from the bottle and, like a toddler, pushes pasta away. ‘So that’s it. Food and I are over.’ Relearning how to eat, she is helped by friends styling themselves ‘Meals on Heels’.
Her eventual recovery makes her euphoric, and euphoria, it turns out, does not ‘write white’, but is colourfully evoked in Fox’s word-perfect style. She feels weightless, elated, omnipotent, inviolable, peaceful. She spins on angel wings.
‘Happiness is learned, it seems to me, and is cumulative. It is also in one’s own gift; one can choose it; it is not only conferred.’ This is true, too, of wisdom. ‘Narcissism and need,’ she has learned, are ‘a pernicious combination’. She also observes friends’ undead parents, and realises they can be dismayingly flawed; so she is ‘off the hook’ about orphanhood. There is resolution in every sense here, and her experience gifted her this witty, life-affirming book.