Songs from a Lead Lined Room

Advocate readers may recognize Suzanne Strempek Shea - a successful novelist who lives in nearby Bondsville - as the author of the short story "What Her Life Is Like,'' which appeared last January in this paper's "Fiction Special.''

In January 2000, Shea was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, she was 41, with three novels under her belt, and a fourth on the way. She had exercised daily, eaten vegetarian, never once smoked - and, suddenly, there she was: commuting to post-lumpectomy radiation treatments.

Although Shea had never been a diarist, she began recording, meticulously, her experience. This month, Beacon Press publishes "Songs From a Lead-Lined Room" ($23), Shea's blunt, often witty take on the psychic shock and spiritual degradation of her sudden bout with cancer. In "Songs," Shea talks cancer honestly, and without self-pity: touching on her doctor, her hospital waiting room, her guru; her indignities, her ironies, her fears.

As for the prose, Shea is a devotee of '80s-style minimalism, and her style (spare - not dull; chiseled - not contrived; period-heavy - comma-lite) certainly suits the subject.

"Songs" may be only one in a recent spate of well-written cancer accounts, but Shea conveys her catastrophe here with precise attention to detail and a poet's linguistic economy.