Cleavage

By Theanna Bischoff

Cleavage tracks the patchwork musings of Leah, who, at twenty-four years old and two years into a relationship, discovers she has breast cancer. Told in fragments reminiscent of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, Cleavage details Leah's struggles with her illness and treatments, the conflict between her disease and her boyfriend, her ambivalence toward her job, and a long-standing feud with her mother and only sister.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1897126255
• ISBN13: 9781897126257
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: NeWest Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A powerful novel!

Cleavage definitely stands as one of the most powerful and memorable books I have read. It explores the travails of a cancer diagnosis with a sort of raw and incisive candidness that produces an almost palpable, choking sense of anxiety and grief. Challenging the naive notion that cancer often leads to personal growth, this book poignantly depicts the bare and visceral experience of cancer, stripped of the overlay of cloying sentimentality. The main character Leah is masterfully constructed. Struggling with the relationships with her boyfriend and mother, she shows all the ambivalences and complexities of being human. Although the story is told in fragments, there is an effortless seamlessness about it - piecemeal descriptions of the mundane aspects of Leah's life are held together by an underlying sense of the more profound aspects of her character; a deep feeling of personal vulnerability and piercing angst reveals itself in these passages, and gives them a sort of haunting force. This is a powerful novel by a gifted writer, and I count it as one of my favourites.