Additional information
by Janet Todd (Author)
After a life of reading and writing, what does it feel like to be deprived of both, to be thrown back only on what's in your head? The literary snippets that emerge into Todd's consciousness during a month of radiation are sometimes apt, often ludicrous. They draw her back into childhood in Wales, Bermuda, Ceylon when literature functioned as friend and escape, to her unquiet past in sixties Ghana, then America at the dawn of the rights movements.
Her father, nearing 100, is caught in the same 'hospital-land' both learn the selfishness of sickness and both respond by telling stories.
Front Jacket
Radiation Diaries tells of a month of radiotherapy treatment undergone when Janet Todd was president of a Cambridge college and while her father, in his 100th year, was approaching death, with skin cancer. The day-by-day treatment brought into her mind flashes from her early life in Bermuda and Ceylon with her father, in Ghana and Puerto Rico, as a young woman, along with stored poems from childhood. Written each morning and night, it tells of the terror she induced in herself with insomniac nights on the web, searching out percentages of recoveries and death, of alternative treatments. Her reactions will be common to others who spend time in hospital-land. Todd's experiences and writings will inspire and help others with these illness and treatments, and those who care for them.
Unflinching in detail, Radiation Diaries will strike chords for anyone who has suffered a life-threatening illness, but the book's message is positive, for the author lives well and has a new career. Now 75, she completed her term as President of a Cambridge college, while ill, published further books and became a grandmother. Now she maintains her academic career with speeches and lectures, has become a novelist, and travelled to launch her fiction in US and the UK, while still recovering. Surrounded by family and friends, she continues her peripatetic existence, albeit more by creative work from her imagination and via computer than by frequent exotic travels to the places she has lived and taught.
"Janet Todd turns her renowned literary intelligence to her experience as a cancer patient. Original, forceful and often funny; there is no other cancer diary like it. The book's clear-eyed detail is a reminder that indignity, pain and fear do not diminish memory, imagination or the self." Terri Apter, psychologist and author of Passing Judgment: Praise and Blame in Everyday Life
Author Biography
Janet Todd, novelist (A Man of Genus, 2016) and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Douglass College, Rutgers, NJ and at the University of Florida. An expert on women's writing and feminism and founder of the journal, Women's Writing, she has published biographies and critical work on many authors, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn (Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, 2017). Now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen, she lives in Cambridge and Venice, and is completing her third novel, Don't You Know There's a War On? (forthcoming, 2019).
