Chick Lit and Cancer

There I am, on page 153, reading along happily, and suddenly one of the older secondary characters starts getting thin and tired and I know exactly what's going to happen. She's got breast cancer, or maybe ovarian. Depending on the book, she'll either recover by the last few chapters, or she'll slip gently away surrounded by the loving women who supported her throughout.

I don't know why the authors keep zapping these characters, but I have my suspicions. One is that the characters, who tend to be gutsy earth mother types, are taking the readers' interest away from the protagonist, a thirty-something woman who is mired in an unsatisfactory life. We don't want the attention pulled from her and the husband who's ignoring her and letting himself get a little potbelly, and the children who take her attention away from the career that isn't quite right for her (she really needs something more creative) -- well, I'm bored with her, too, and more interested in the earth mother myself. So why not write a novel about her and kill off the protagonist instead?

And it's always a female cancer. As I've noticed, women in real life get lung cancer, colon cancer, and everything else except prostate cancer, but in these books it's always the breasts or the ovaries. Maybe this is to stress the femaleness of life, death and the other big subjects for the readers. Maybe it's because these cancers are what the readers are most afraid of. Or maybe, as my daughter suggests, it's because a case of female cancer is written into the contract with the publisher.

A couple of the books I've read recently that fit this are The Friday Night Knitting Club, The Pretend Wife (there are more, but I'm having a chemobrain attack). Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed both until the point where I threw the book across the room and Jerry said "again?" and I asked, "Why can't they ever get leprosy or shingles instead?"