SOURCE: McCabe, Mary Margaret. “Laughing in Its Face.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4988 (6 November 1998): 28.

In the following review, McCabe considers several titles which offer personal perspectives on cancer, including French's A Season in Hell.

Death may be common to us all, but it is irredeemably solitary. Can others' experience of the imminence of death ever help us to escape that private view? In these books, four people describe—in quite different modes—their experiences with cancer. In 1997, Ruth Picardie, a former Guardian journalist, died as a consequence of breast cancer. Before I Say Goodbye contains the columns she wrote as the cancer progressed; a series of e-mails and letters between Picardie and her friends, and some editorial comment by her partner, Matt Seaton. Liz Tilberis is the Editor of Harpers Bazaar in the United States; in No Time to Die, she describes how she coped with ovarian cancer in...