This is not the book that Sarah Hughes intended it to be. Aged just 46, the journalist learned that her recently treated breast cancer had not only returned and spread, it had become incurable. She went on to defy statistics and live with it for more than two years (the median is just 11 months) but it wasn’t long enough to complete the work she had originally outlined. And yet, while they’re clearly as nothing compared with some of her life’s other incomplete endeavours – most poignantly, the raising of her two children – missing chapters such as Financial Advice from an Unrepentant Gambler and The Secret Lives of Catholic Saints are also fully eclipsed by what she did manage to achieve.
Here is a volume that packs in wisdom and wit, grace and frivolity. It isn’t purely a cancer book, either. Yes, it’s broadly about living with the disease, dying from it even – a neglected topic, she observes – but these memoiristic essays also yomp across food and high fashion, bonkbusters and box sets. Equally, though she allows for sorrow, her voice and insights – her sheer elan – set them soaring.
