Frontal Matter: Glue Gone Wild

by Suzanne Samples, Barbara Lockwood (Editor)

Overview

A fun, funny, and heartbreakingly real memoir of a woman's fight against terminal brain cancer. The writing is honest, charming, and full of cuss words. Suzanne Samples teaches English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She was diagnosed with a frontal lobe glioblastoma multiforme at 36. She loves roller derby and lives on the side of a mountain with her pets Gatsby, Prufrock, and Duffles. Featured in swag bags for the 2019 Golden Globe presenters and nominees.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947041240
Publisher:	Running Wild Press
Publication date:	10/15/2018
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Suzanne teaches English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She was diagnosed with a frontal lobe glioblastoma multiforme at 36. She loves roller derby and lives on the side of a mountain with her pets Gatsby, Prufrock, and Duffles.

Editorial Reviews

"A uniquely poetic memoir with dark humor and profound insights." -- STARRED Kirkus Review.

"Frontal Matter, like all great memoirs, combine the writer’s urgent need to tell her story with a keen awareness of why the world needs to hear it. In this beautifully written book, Suzanne Samples confronts not only disease and mortality, but friendship, love, identity, and an artist’s struggle to create lasting work. The book is moving and wise, with unexpected moments of clever humor. That Samples wrote it while facing down a terminal disease is a testament not only to her strength but to her immense talent. We are lucky that Samples has given us Frontal Matter, so that we can spend time in her intelligent, charming company—both while she is still with us, and long after her bright light has gone out." -- Acclaimed author of After the Eclipse

From the Publisher

★ 2019-10-17
A North Carolina woman reexamines her life after being diagnosed with a terminal illness in this memoir.

"Everything was fine. And then everything went to shit within twenty minutes," Samples (English/Appalachian State Univ.; A Mad Girl's Love Song, 2016, etc.) writes of a fateful leg seizure at the age of 36 that ended with her in the hospital, diagnosed with brain cancer. Before that, she was enjoying her life teaching and writing and being part of a roller derby team. Her medical dramas revolved around Type 1 diabetes and her love-hate relationship with her endocrinologist. But now everything changed; as she puts it, "Diabetes is a slow, drawn-out death; cancer is a quick blow." She writes in percussive sentences that jump from her diagnosis and treatment to moments further in the past and other stray thoughts. She muses on the secret sex lives of her nurses and reevaluates relationships as a parade of friends, family, and exes come to visit her. She dwells most notably on Chole (pronounced "Cole") the "narcissistic sociopath" with whom she had a tumultuous relationship. She tells of Uber drivers who offered to pray for her, her partying sister who sent her drunken texts about conspiracy theories, and how she spoke directly to her own brain tumor, asking for its opinion on the life that it might be cutting short. "This is not a Tuesday with Morrie," she writes, speaking to the existential weight and poetic form of her writing. At times, Samples repeats simple sentence structures over and over, like a record that has broken, but she marries this with short, smoothly written vignettes that manage to be frightening, sad, and humorous all at once. At one point, for example, a nurse confuses her asymmetrical haircut for brain-surgery prep gone wrong. Samples also bravely commits to paper her darkest thoughts about dying and the most humiliating physical moments of her illness. Overall, her memoir perfectly reflects the chaos of her experience, but she guides readers through it by staying true to her belief that "honest writing is good writing."

A uniquely poetic memoir with dark humor and profound insights.

Kirkus Reviews