Cancer vixen - Marisa Acocella Marchetto

What happens when a shoe-crazy, lipstick-obsessed, wine-swilling, pasta-slurping, fashion-fanatic, madly-in-love, single-forever, about-to-get-married big city girl cartoonist with a fabulous life finds.A LUMP IN HER BREAST!?

Marisa Acocella Marchetto - said New York cartoonist and downtown party girl - answers this question, and many more, in this touching and often funny comic-strip chronicle of her 11-month battle with breast cancer. Drawing (literally) on everything from her first mammogram to radiation treatments, she tells the story of her illness with honesty, bravery and searing Manhattanite humour.

Unflinching in her observations and unflagging in spirit, Marchetto confronts the disease head-on, refusing to become a cancer 'victim'. Instead, she wears designer shoes to her chemo sessions and marries her long-time love, Manhattan restaurateur Silvano Marchetto, along the way laughing and crying with her friends, arguing with her mother (a.k.a. 'smother') and striking up conversations with God.

While laughing in the face of her illness at every available opportunity, Marchetto never trivialises it. 'Cancer Vixen' is courageous, honest, funny and frightening, but above all, it achieves the almost impossible, in taking a woman's worst fear and transforming it into something uplifting, inspiring and life-affirming.