Songs from a Lead Lined Room

I just finished Suzanne Strempek Shea's first book-length work of non-fiction, and her writing is direct, canny, clear. It's a weighty, serious book about breast cancer, but her individual perceptions of life make you laugh sometimes. She writes like the bullets she hates so much in the gun of the hunter she sees on her nature walks: precise, penetrating, no-nonsense. She shares in these diary-like excerpts exactly what it was like to receive a cancer diagnosis and experience radiation day after day for months, her skin getting more and more burned from it, how her life changed from it, how she was always worrying about dying and many other things. Suzanne Strempek Shea's new book gradually brings you through a process that not many people expose to the air or the public: the process of learning to live with one's own death - and the discomfort and anguish of being alive but knowing, more clearly than you've ever known, that you will someday die. The extreme vulnerability in this exposure makes the volume as a whole so strong that you come away with a deep, valuable understanding of what the struggle against a life-threatening disease can really be like.