Last night my boyfriend T, the newspaper man, brought home an advanced (unproofed) copy of “Cancer Vixen: A True Story.” It’s a graphic memoir coming out in October by The New Yorker and Glamour cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto—she’s known for her fashiony comics of size zero women in great stilettos with perfectly shaggy haircuts. I’ve always liked her work and wished there was more of it in The New Yorker’s often stodgy cartoon mix of talking dogs and bickering couples. And why haven’t they given her a cover? ANYWAY, I was up till one last night and then spent an hour this morning reading it cover to cover.

When the book starts, Marisa is a single cartoonist in New York, skipping along from deadline to deadline, inappropriate relationship to inappropriate relationship when she meets Silvano Marchetto, the Maserati-driving owner of the celebrity-staple NYC restaurant, Da Silvano. On their first real date he asks her to “go steady” (at 43) and soon they’ve got wedding plans. She’s elated. Then, because this is a cartoon, we literally see death around the corner, waiting with a scythe, hood fashionably cowled. She’s soon told she has breast cancer and proceeds to go through the nightmarish—and impeccably documented—process of giving her life to doctors, hospitals, chemo, and illness, while doing her best to be vixen, not victim.

As much as it’s a medical and personal journey, it’s also spiritual. In one sequence she’s sitting at her drafting table remembering people she’s known who have died of cancer. They’re sitting on clouds above her head explaining why they think they got cancer: “We’re from the breast cancer and leukemia cluster 20 miles from your parents’ shore house,” says one. The next page is filled with strangers on clouds talking about the toxins that killed them, which culminates in, “Aren’t we enough evidence?” The next spread is nothing but a giant flame of a candle, “A moment of silence. When you light a candle, you illuminate a soul,” it says. I almost started weeping. She also has a cosmic experience at her first Kabbalah meeting and makes subsequent visits to the rabbi, communes with Saint Philomena at a nearby church, has her “(s)mother” tell her how awful her aura looks, and occasionally chats with her one-eyed meditating, literally above-it-all, enlightened self.

My only gripe is her short-shrifting alternative medicine because one crunchy doctor gave her lousy advice.

But it’s mostly moving and funny, and lovely and a little bit hard to read. Marisa, it turns out, actually lives a few blocks away from me and was being treated for cancer at around the same time that I was. And her man, like mine, the one who gave me this book, never wavered either.

I can hardly wait until October, when the book comes out in full, blazing color, and you can read it too.

— by Valerie Reiss (Amy’s on vacation)