The stories you tell, the stories you tell yourself.

Booktherapy is built on the idea that a book can be therapeutic, can tell you what you need to know when you needed to know it, that a good book can nourish your soul.

What is a book, any book, but a story?

So, this is a story I was told, it is not yet a book but I understand it will be. It affected me deeply.

A friend of mine recently had lunch with a woman he has known a long time, a woman who was his right hand and helper in projects that kept his family in ribbons, bows and private school.

This woman is luscious apparently, well known and appreciated for her heavy auburn hair and her delicious curvy and milky body, specifically her glorious breasts, now removed.

Her sister has died of breast cancer and she is fighting same but at lunch, in the way of some brave soldiers against this insidious and silent enemy, she is jaunty and optimistic and actually down to earth funny about it all. Cancer has a focusing effect on some people. As a brilliant lawyer used to say "this will knock the birdshit off the pump handle" -- suddenly you are faced with your own body warring against itself and the truth that we live only in the present, we only know we have this very minute, becomes utterly tangible. Some die of this idea, some thrive with it.

This woman, on her way to her radical mastectomy, asked for one last look and popped her top to take a view of the girls before being wheeled into the killing room, the room of their demise. Her glorious hair is sacrificed to chemo, and much of what you could have thought was her is now gone. What is truly her is shining through.

That last request, the request to take a last look at her breasts is an idea that has intrigued me since I heard it.

I have lost close friends and relatives to cancer, I have a gorgeous painting -- macabre to most people, utterly beautiful to me -- that is an ode to cancer and its defining effect, how it renders us merely a casing, soul against a recalcitrant and unruly body that suddenly turns enemy. Cancer hovers very near to all of us, the lucky among us stand near and not within its grip.

Cancer is the body turning against itself and I think this is the core of why this story has so gripped me.

I have fought against my own body all my life. After an eating disorder, not yet well but not the weight of a child either, I nearly walked with my nose in the air, so horrified was I to catch a glimpse of my own leg, thigh, belly, arms. Today it would seem that to some I am curvy or at the very least "athletic" -- shop girls often admonish me when I am freaking in front of the mirror: "Love your curves! men love curves!" I am not suggesting I have a sexy body but strangers call me so. To me, this body is something to fight against.

This woman revelled in her sexiness and is sorry to see it gone. But not too sorry, it's more like nostalgia, there are more important things now. One of my friends, a wild woman, had a couple of kids and thereafter various things sagged and dropped and she said "oh well, my body served me well, I had a lot of fun with it at the time" -- a perfectly healthy approach I think.

What struck me is this. Would I have wanted to say goodbye to these old friends? I wonder if I would miss them if they were gone. I don't want to sound more shallow than I have to, but they have often gotten in the way.

What this woman has shown me in high relief is that you can turn against your body or your body can turn against you. The salvation is being at peace with the whole.