Lopsided: A Memoir

A hilarious and wickedly irreverent look at life with cancer

Lopsided is not your ordinary cancer memoir. Meredith Norton chronicles every step of her experience, starting with her bizarre symptoms while living in Paris to moving back home to California and living with her compulsive parents and their five television sets. Irreverent and incredibly funny, Norton rails against self-pity and victimhood and rants about the innumerable copies of Lance Armstrongas cancer survival book pressed on her by well-meaning family and friends.

Alongside the harrowing portrait of her treatments, Norton offers equally amusing memories from her offbeat life. We see her childhood time during a somewhat racist ski trip, a family reunion at a Florida alligator farm, and her life in a tree house with a neighbor, who, despite being vegan, hates mice enough to taxidermy them into miniature versions of racecar drivers, Jesus, a UPS delivery man, and Sally Jesse Raphael.

Like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, Nortonas razor-sharp wit is at once riotous and excruciating. Lopsided is the remarkable debut of a masterful humorist.

" Less a cancer survival guide and more a lovably unfiltered e-mail from a hilarious friend."

-People

" Norton [offers an] assured tone, keen eye and dry wit. I hope to encounter this clear, incisive, highly amusing voice again. Soon."

-The Orlando Sentinel

"A truly elegant memoir."

-O, The Oprah Magazine

" Norton strikes a successful balance between light and heavy, keeping her audience consistently engaged."

-San Francisco Chronicle

In her hilarious and wickedly irreverent look at life with cancer, Norton chronicles every step of her experience and rails against self-pity and victimhood.

By the age of thirty -four , Meredith Norton had been a hymnal editor, art restorer, game-show producer, and a public school teacher. She'd even lived in a tree house and shepherded goats in Minorca. But none of these unusual experiences prepared her for the most dramatic turn her life would take: the diagnosis of an aggressive form of breast cancer. In this brilliantly funny and irreverent memoir, Norton approaches the disease with a refreshing combination of humor and tenacity, railing against victimhood and self-pity and refusing to become a stereotype.

Told with a razor-sharp wit akin to David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, Lopsided is most definitely not a typical cancer memoir; it's the bitingly funny debut of a natural-born social observer.

Meredith Norton is an avid rower and intermittently pursuing a graduate degree in physics and engineering.