Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics
Imagine if Cathy Guisewite got breast cancer. Then imagine that she hired a seventh-grade girl to illustrate the comic strip in her place. Then take away all the jokes. The end result will be something not unlike Miriam Engelberg’s CANCER MADE ME A SHALLOWER PERSON: A MEMOIR IN COMICS.
Full disclosure before I continue with this review: I’m probably not the target audience. I’m a man. I don’t have breast cancer. And I have a high standard for “comic” literature.
In her introduction, Engelberg name-checks Harvey Pekar, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Mary Fleener and Lynda Barry. The big difference is that Pekar knows he can’t draw, so he hires true comic artists to do the work, while the others are legitimate artists – Barry’s art is primitive, to be sure, but its power is in the storytelling and craft. Engelberg, on the other hand, is apparently someone who believes she can draw, and has convinced her publisher of this, but she can’t. Which wouldn’t be a problem if this were the riotously funny, emotionally raw comics memoir I was expecting from the title.
Instead, it’s surprisingly vanilla; a sad but safe read for those whose lives are deeply affected by Meredith Viera replacing Katie Couric on TODAY. There are opportunities for great jokes, such as her annoyance with Dina, the overly cheerful, fundamentalist Christian lab tech with a sock puppet named Cheer-Up Kitty, but you’ve already written a funnier sequence in your head than what Engelberg gives us. Perhaps she doesn’t want to offend potential readers who are just like Dina, and that, as well as her inability to set up and deliver a truly effective joke, is the book’s downfall, not to mention the vast superiority of similarly themed books, notably Brian Fies’ Eisner Award-winning MOM’S CANCER.
I’m sure this book might be an entertaining, inspirational read for those in its target (whose only experience with comics is the aforementioned Guisewite), but for readers like me, it’s Amateur Hour at the Cancer Comics Café. –Brian Winkeler
[...] Not only did Miriam Engelberg get cancer and become a shallower person, but our very own Brian Winkeler decided to kick her in the ribs while she’s just getting her hair back. He says CANCER MADE ME A SHALLOWER PERSON: A MEMOIR IN COMICS is "surprisingly vanilla" and that the author has an "inability to set up and deliver a truly effective joke." He then proceeded to have 50 Domino’s pizzas delivered to Engelberg’s house (C.O.D.) and call her at all hours of the night playing Johnny Mandel’s "Suicide is Painless" over the receiver. Mental note: Winkeler is not a man to be trifled with. [...]