Is This a Funny Story?: A Stage-Four Memoir

A darkly comic, posthumously published memoir about mortality, memory, and the messy business of being human.

The telephone call makes her legs go weak and forces her to sit down: "The tests results from your biopsy came back. They're positive for malignancy."

Ellen Vanstone, a writer and journalist of brilliance and biting wit, reacts by carrying on with what she's always done. Making notes. Putting it down on paper in an attempt to make sense of her new reality of drug trials, medical procedures and personal upheaval.

There's also the past to be confronted. Unresolved issues with her siblings. The guilt and shame she still feels about breaking up with the father of her daughter decades earlier over a man who turned out to be the world's worst boyfriend. The chorus of imaginary enemies whispering, Ellen got this because she deserved it, with her reckless, job-quitting, peripatetic, party-smoking, binge-drinking, promiscuous ways.

And ever the writer, she worries about what tone to take: "Should I aim for sad and profound? Or lighthearted and entertaining?" The memoir she came up with is all of those things and more: unforgettable, moving, and, of course, funny.