A compelling and beautiful written memoir, extensively researched and refreshingly honest. This grueling personal account by one of the top feminists in academia details the horrors an ovarian cancer patient usually undergoes and reveals how little progress has been made in the treatment and detection of ovarian cancer over the past few years. Gubar takes the reader to the depths of her despair and then back up to the heights of her joy and gratitude at the life she's been given, and especially her beloved husband Don. This is, above all else, a love story that is real, poignant and a must read. Highly recommend. ( )

Sometimes a dose of misery lit is required for perspective. This is a harrowing account and I respect Ms Gubar for telling it straight. Her insights on quality vs quantity of life with a terminal diagnosis are issues I have pondered but unless its your own life coming to a foreseeable end it is difficult to know when to stop aggressive treatment- especially when your doctors take the safe route to avoid being sued. Is it possible to have a dignified death?

This article from the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande called Letting Go is very apropos here ( )

What an extraordinary achievement. What an astonishingly clear-headed book. What a hard book to read and how glad I am to have read it. It's never 'brave' in the facile sense we use that word for, to describe other memoirs about impossible circumstances. And yet, Gubar is "brave" in the purest sense, for having written this book with her eyes so completely open to her experience.

I was grateful not only for this stark explanation of the physical changes Gubar and other ovarian cancer patients go through, but also to learn how much she was sustained by her love of words--how her vast reading, throughout her life and during the course of the disease described in this book, gave her a special solace, and allowed her to connect with what's good and real about being alive. While she writes lovingly of the support she receives from her extraordinary husband and family, it seemed to me that her inner strength, her ability to write this book at all, came from a lifetime of using language in a very precise way, both to understand and to describe her world.

I am one of those rare weird statistical outliers, a woman whose oncologist told her all about the debulking procedure and the many organs I was about to lose (who among us has heard of an "omentum" before being told she's about to lose it?) but in my case I woke up from the operation to learn I was cancer-free, a false positive, with a doctor who didn't seem to know how to handle this good news ("a first-year resident could have done your operation" was all he said, and gruffly). Even though my experience with that operation and Gubar's veered drastically apart at the moment we each opened our eyes, I am so grateful to her for writing down what it's like to be put to sleep, helpless and ignorant of whether you'll wake up ok, or wake up to find you are missing many internal organs and you're going to die soon anyway.

Gubar also completely captures the (apparently universally) appalling way that gynecological oncologists treat their patients. For this reason alone I would wish for every gynecological oncologist to read this book carefully, to think about the way they treat their patients, and to strive to improve at least the way they deliver their news, even if they can't seem to get better at treating the disease. ( )

Brilliant and literate account of dying from ovarian cancer and the exacerbations caused by aggressive treatment. The author is brutally honest about her condition and what it is doing to her mind and body. The approach of death is everywhere, and I left the book dwelling on the inevitability of my own death, the harshness and degradations of its occurrence, and the wish that I can face it in as clear-sighted a manner as the author. ( )

This memoir of enduring ovarian cancer is rough, gritty, and pragmatic, but incredibly pessimistic and fatalistic. The author's choice of wording n the subtitle, enduring rather than surviving is a clue to her experience.

I'm not saying that she was wrong to be realistic or that her experience wasn't incredibly difficult. I applaud her for being able to look death in the eye.

However, as an ovarian cancer survivor, myself, I have to say that my experience, my journey is incredibly different from hers. Reading this book was difficult because it made me think not about my mortality, which I've already had plenty of time to come to terms with, but about how awful things might get before that day comes.

I'm not saying that my journey with ovarian cancer has been a breeze so far. I'm not minimizing the things I've been through and am still going through. I guess this book was difficult for me because it made me face that things will very likely get even more difficult than they have been.

Another thing I came away with, though, is that I share her anger and frustration that more progress hasn't been made in the fight aganst ovarian cancer. I'm glad that breast cancer has made such serious strides, but even so, the technology used to diagnose breast cancer seems barbaric. You wouldn't find men agreeing to have their testicles squished to diagnose testicular cancer. And diagnosing ovarian cancer is a joke. I, myself, was diagnosed with everything from a sciatica to a back fracture to maliase and lack of appetite of unknown origin. It took a trip to the ER to finally get a proper diagnosis. Surely, we can do better than this.