Offensive Thinking
Brain tumors suck. Hi, I'm Patrick btw. This is my cancer blog. My "normal" stuff is over here.
Book Review: It's Ok to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too)
I cannot remember how I came across “It’s Ok to Laugh (Crying is Cool Too)” by Nora McInerny. Might’ve been an automated recommendation on Goodreads for all I know.
Nora lost her husband to Glioblastoma in 2014, and also her Dad to another type of cancer, and had a miscarriage of her second child. That’s quite a lot to go through in a short time span, and this is her story. Although, “story” is a bit much as that usually implies a structure roughly following a linear timeline, which this book does not. It might have to do with the fact that the book came after her blog My Husband’s Tumor gained some success. I didn’t read the blog yet, so I honestly cannot say if the book is just a collection of blog posts.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the book. The sometimes almost stream of consciousness style of writing made me switch between laughing and crying, sometimes with only two paragraphs in between. The downside is that the chapters, with their sometimes huge jumps between topics and timelines, often seem to be kind of jumbled together randomly.
It was interesting for me to read a brain tumor story not from the perspective of the patient, but of his wife and in a way their son, who was two years old when his dad died. They decided to have a child even after the prognosis, which is kinda the same my wife and I did. Although my prognosis is far better than his, but no judgement there, we still might’ve done the same. Maybe that’s what made it so hard to read sometimes, as I don’t care too much about myself dying (yet). The hardest thought is that I will leave my wife and children behind, a thought that always tears me up. Even though from a purely logical standpoint, I know it won’t matter for me because I will be dead.
The book is an easy read (as in style-wise, not topic-wise of course) and Nora has some nice dark humor, which resonates with me. It therefore gets a thumbs up. It’s not my favourite brain tumor-related book, but it’s definitely worth a read.