Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

By Mary Cappello

Foreword Book of the Year Award
Independent Publishers Award (IPPY)
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Publishing Triangle Award Finalist
GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for "Getting the News," The Georgia Review, Summer 2009
Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for "Getting the News"
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters

An extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists' queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs "see" inside breast cancer's paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate?

The first chapter paves the way for the book's central emphases: a meditation on the nature of "news" and the new, on noticing, on messages--including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease--and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues.

Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms-- infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute--with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0823294048
• ISBN13: 9780823294046
• Release Date: July 2021
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Georgeous and purposeful

"Called Back" is a georgeous book, and I don't mean just the beautiful x-ray photograph on the cover. The book aims to talk about cancer differently and succeeds. To call Cappello's language "poetic" is not quite accurate; to say she utilizes the conventions of poetry to get at what's true -- that to think about cancer differently is to think about language in a new way -- is more to the point. Although Cappello is very honest about her experience, she isn't writing "merely" about her cancer journey. She's writing about how we feel, think, love, smell, and write differently because of cancer and its aftermath. The book is for all of us -- those of us who do not have cancer, those of us who do, and those of us who will someday. If you want to think and breathe and write, then read this book.

Calling Us Forward

Regardless if you're a patient or a poet, a doctor, a nurse, a caregiver, a reader, or a loved one, Called Back asks us to look not only into our lives, but out to something much greater. It's more than a guidebook through one woman's cancer; it's an examination of the intricacies of dailiness and love--from Cappello's life and her voice, into ours. For how could we not be unchanged by a work of such grace, wit, fierce temperament, and even joy? We would be utterly lost without this book. Sara Greenslit, author of The Blue of Her Body

"Tell me what you're feeling." So she does --- in remarkable detail and clarity

I have read my share of cancer memoirs, and I'm quite sure I have never encountered a woman whose reaction to the diagnosis of breast cancer --- a friend's, not even hers --- is this: "I responded in that selfishly aggressive way that each of us has at least a touch of. I flung myself on the bed and...and commanded Jean to...have her way with me, to do what she would with me....to return me to myself by way of the erotic." Mary Cappello, just as an FYI, is not some attention-seeker using "Called Back" to call attention to her gay status or to shock and tease. She's a noted author and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She knows the value of every word. So imagine what it was like when she got the word that she had breast cancer. First, the attention to language. "It's concerning," says the ultrasound technician, explaining why Cappello needs a biopsy. A few pages later, the professor weighs in: "Words...cast shadows." And later again, she'll ask: "What does breast cancer awareness really make anyone aware of?" Well, in her case, it's mostly interior, it's about consciousness: memories of a friend who had a small lump and is now dead, considerations of the breast as a milk machine and as "a WATS line to the clitoris," free-association to Gertrude Stein's remark about roses, and, not least, a fierce attention to interior logic ("A person's cancer is new to her but not new to itself"). But not totally interior --- this is also a story about radiation ("fighting fire with fire"), told with no hurry to get to the end. That sounds odd; the book is 200 pages, it's a brisk read. What I mean --- what she means --- is that she wants to feel every moment, to live it fully, to drain it of meaning before moving on. Mary Cappello is certainly the most literate woman to write about her illness. Before surgery, she reads Proust in the hospital; he doesn't require rapt attention. Her lover's profile reminds her of "a medieval prince." But don't be fooled. She may be learned. She may be gay. But her emotions and thoughts seem universal --- just a lot more accessible than we're used to. There's a terrific story about a farmstand near the New England cabin that is the country retreat for Cappello and her partner. It's adorned with American flags. The proprietor wears U.S. Marines T-shirts. Late one afternoon, he corners Cappabello and her lover. He has a question: "Was it hard to come out to your families?" And he has a reason for asking it, which I won't spoil here, except to say --- it's hard to know, really know, about other people. About the title: "Called back" were Emily Dickinson's last words. And the words carved on her tombstone. For Mary Cappello, who is now cancer-free, they're the last words on her illness. And a very powerful title for an extraordinary book.

calling back

In "Called Back," Mary Cappello does us the favor of resisting the sappy pink-ribbon sentimentality and jaded battle metaphors of cancer lore; instead she brings a whole new language to the experience of the disease, the response, the treatment, the ongoing life of a cancer patient. Cappello is both a keen observer of the details of her own passage and a poet in her exposition of that passage. Deeply intimate and relentlessly honest, she takes us inside an experience that we all fear--not to do anything as mundane and perhaps useless as to "reassure," but to show us how it is mundane; to show where cancer intersects and overlaps with life. There is nothing of the "usual" in this account, but there is much we need to know.

Reacting to Cancer

Capello, Mary. "Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life", Alyson Books, 2009. Reacting to Breast Cancer Amos Lassen I imagine that the most frightful moment that a person can have is when the doctor tells him that he has cancer. I am sure that there are those that are ready to fight the disease the moment they get the news but I doubt that there are many like Mary Capello who summoned remarkable courage and decided that she would write about the experience so that we could share it with her. Her descriptions are full of detail that is, at time, harrowing. This is quite naturally not an easy book to read and this is not just because of the nature of cancer but because Capello so wins us over that we feel especially close to her. If it were not for that and the beautiful writing I would not have been able to get through this book. It is intelligent and emotional and it tells us a lot about breast cancer. We enter Capello's mind and we hear her thoughts and we share them. The book is more than a memoir it is an exercise in victory over a terrible and fatal disease and a tale of redemption. Unfortunately you will have to wait until October when it will be published. It puts cancer under a lens and we see the truths about the diseases. What is surprising is that some of the truths are erotic and sensual while others are loneliness and solitude.