But grit is gold—and she's got it. She recently returned from the place she calls Cancerland and brought with her The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer—and Back, a wise and surprisingly witty take on her harrowing struggle to survive breast cancer and a bone-marrow transplant ("I don't want to smell one more freaking flower," she writes). In its pages, she lets loose on divorce and dating, baldness and bad doctors. "This book is about a triumph over loneliness," Rich says. "And about learning to be a kick-ass patient and a kick-ass person."
Rich's life began to fall apart in August 1988, when she was 32. Her marriage had just ended, and she had moved alone to a new apartment. In the shower one morning, she felt a lump in her left breast. Rich called her internist, who assured her she was too young to have breast cancer and then joked that he would happily "feel your breasts anytime." When she told her Freudian therapist about the lump, the woman told her she didn't have cancer, she had "issues."
It wasn't until February 1989, when she was working at GQ magazine—and had health insurance—that Rich finally went to a breast surgeon. He also dismissed her concerns, but she demanded a biopsy. It showed cancer. Rich underwent a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. "The hair [loss] makes it a reality," she says. "You've had a sore throat before, you've thrown up. But nothing in nature replicates all your hair falling out. It takes away your individuality. All cancer patients look alike."
Rich continued to work, but she was given fewer assignments. She says her boss told her, "No one wants to have anything to do with you because you remind them that they could die." Meanwhile, acquaintances acted as matchmakers. One woman tried to fix her up with a man who would die of leukemia two days later. Rich says the man told the matchmaker, "I don't want to go out on a date. I'm dying!" The matchmaker replied, "You let her be the judge of that!"
Rich's most loyal friend was ex-husband Diego Olivé, an Argentine writer she met at a party in 1981 and wed two years later. They were crazy about each other, but eventually, she says, their opposite temperaments turned them into parodies of themselves: "I was a stiff-lipped, bloodless, manners-obsessed WASP. He was Ricky Ricardo in a bad mood."
But when she was in pain in the middle of the night, he was the one she would call. Once, he recalls, as they waited for paramedics to take her to the hospital, Rich calmly told him "who I should call, at what time, and what to do with her cats. I would have been screaming and crying and asking God for mercy."
Her cancer was apparently in remission when Rich's life was upended again. In 1992 she lost her job at GQ, and it was a year before she got another full-time job, as an editor at Allure magazine. But the welcome flowers were still fresh on her desk when a routine CAT scan showed tumors in her spine. The cancer had spread.
She endured back braces, paralysis and drugs that made her sick and caused her weight to balloon. The cancer disappeared again, but only temporarily. In December 1993 two vertebrae snapped when she bent down to pick up an envelope. Now the cancer was breaking her bones. Doctors told her that her only hope was a bone-marrow transplant. She began another round of chemotherapy to prepare for the transplant, which was performed in the fall of 1995.
Though she was despondent, Rich fought on. "She was a young woman who never said, 'Why me?' " says her oncologist, George Raptis. Kind colleagues at Allure and a circle of friends—some of them cancer survivors—helped her rebound. "I felt belligerent about cancer," she says. "You took everything, but you're not taking my ability to enjoy life."
It was her sense of humor that kept her sane. Rich recalls a model who gushed over the scarf that covered her bald head, " 'Oh, I like your look! In the world I was working in, what I was going through was 'a look.' "
Acknowledging her illness didn't come easily. Rich grew up near Philadelphia, one of three children of Stuart, 75, a Christian Scientist who considered sickness "just mortal error," and his late wife, Lucy, an Episcopalian who didn't require denial of illness, says Rich, just that one "rise ? above it." A memoirist from age 8—"I had this real sense of time passing; I wanted to preserve things," she says—Rich graduated from Syracuse University in 1977 with a degree in religion. At 21, she moved to Manhattan to begin her career. She was married at 27. "I was work-obsessed," she says. "I didn't learn to have fun until after I got sick."
Now she runs and bikes and revels in sweating the small stuff. "I hated having that cosmic perspective all the time," Rich says. "I get frustrated at normal things, which is wonderful because it means I'm not ill."
Christina Cheakalos
Natasha Stoynoff in New York City
- Contributors:
- Natasha Stoynoff.
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