ABOUT THIS BOOK

Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the dramas and delving into the science. Stern also nudges cancer off center stage by turning to alternative obsessions and pleasures. In seductive writing she describes her life in the garden and kitchen, the hospital and the library, and her travels—down the street to her meditation center, across the border to Mexico, and across the world to Australia. Her immediate world is inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales, lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Lesley Stern is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego; author of Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing, The Smoking Book, and The Scorsese Connection; and coeditor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance.

REVIEWS

“Diary of a Detour is such a great book, excessive like Lesley Stern's own intense appetite for life that includes her wide knowledge about the intricacies of disease. It's the most pleasurable cancer book imaginable. I was riveted, the specificity of the writing is a drug. Stern has written a wonderful, stirring, magnificent book. Oh, World, you are the love object of this hardworking, self-deprecating extravagant genius.”

-- Eileen Myles, author of Evolution

“Diary of a Detour is wonderful on so many levels. Besides being an extraordinary writer, Lesley Stern is emotionally and intellectually sophisticated in such subtle and deep ways. She outlines the stakes of learning to live and feel in the grip of inescapable finitude and mortality, together with others of many kinds and species, but also alone, as irreducibly this vulnerable person and no other. I love this book.”

-- Donna J. Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

"What emerges most powerfully is Stern’s determination to live—not just to stay alive but, as Tennyson writes in 'Ulysses,' 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' . . . A mixture of the mundane and the medical, the ordinary and the extraordinary."

-- Kirkus Reviews

"[Stern's] final book, the magnificent Diary of a Detour (2020) that appeared just before her passing, records how the force of obsession – obsessions with planting and tending, with chickens, with the growing and preparing of food, with the cycles of nature – literally prolonged her life, pulling her through into new and brilliant investigations, and an ever-widening collaboration with activists at all levels of the environmental movement."

-- Adrian Martin ArtsHub

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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