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Twenty-five years ago, Betty Rollin, network television correspondent for CBS, PBS,
and NBC, found out that she had breast cancer. It is ironic that she went to get her
mammogram because she had recently reported on the breast cancer trials of both Betty Ford
and Happy Rockefeller. At the time, it was unusual for women to rush to their doctors and
beg for mammograms, but American women did just that. Armed with scant information, they
demanded treatment, and many women surprisingly found out that they were going to need
lots of it. Rollin was one of them.
This remarkably candid and courageous memoir was written in the aftermath of Rollin's
personal struggle with the disease. No stranger to controversy or controversial subjects
(the assisted death of her mother is the subject of her other bestseller, LAST WISH),
Rollin tells her story in a straightforward way that makes you feel as if your best friend
is going through the disease and letting you in on all the details, for her own sake as
well as yours.
FIRST, YOU CRY is an informative and remarkable book, in context or out of it --- when
Rollin wrote the book, it was the first memoir of battling the disease to hit the
marketplace, and readers responded overwhelmingly. She has now been free of the disease
for 25 years, and the book is being reprinted in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
In her foreword, she speaks proudly of being a part of that celebration. Amazed by the way
things have progressed, she also acknowledges that there is still far to go in the
treatment and hopefully the eventual cure of the disease.
Rollin has such style, personally and professionally, that FIRST, YOU CRY is as uplifting
a document of pain and heartache as any reader will find anywhere. Her mastectomy is
handled with such humor and bluntness that you feel like you've lived through each moment
with her. She is a very feminist yet feminine spirit (clearly those two things never need
be all that separate), and it is fascinating to see her be angry at herself for caring
what she looks like and stressing out over bras and other fashion questions to hide her
missing breast. These are the juxtapositions of personal consideration and medical
analysis that Rollin does so well, that makes FIRST, YOU CRY such a landmark and important
work.
For those with and without the disease, this one woman's story will enthrall you, shake
you to the core and send you running to your doctor for your own perhaps belated exams.
FIRST, YOU CRY is the key book in the pantheon of what has been written on the disease
throughout the last quarter century.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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