Synopses & Reviews
From the author of The Women's Room and My Summer with George, a compelling memoir of her victory over esophageal cancer, and her virtual return from the dead.
A Season in Hell takes us from the moment when the diagnosis of cancer is made and Marilyn French embarks on a grueling regime of radiation and chemotherapy, through six weeks in a coma from which it was thought she had no chance of recovering, to her even more terrifying postcoma accident and her miraculous return to life.
With the insight, intelligence, and emotional honesty through which she has written about so many other women's lives in her fiction, Marilyn French now considers her own life, as she battles with doctors and the medical establishment; as her family and friends surround her, giving her strength; and as she defies all doomful predictions and emerges whole and more than ever open to experience.
As French examines death's role in her life in this stunning memoir, she shares a sense of what pain and suffering can mean to a person who utterly denies transcendent thought, and how a closeness to death affects the life we are living now.