A good, solid life-threatening illness can be the making of a writer. This has certainly been the case for Genevieve Fox, a long-serving journalist, whose delightful and moving first book Milkshakes and Morphine was inspired by a diagnosis of head and neck cancer. The illness, though treatable, is just as grim as it sounds: she pulls no punches in describing the horror of breaking the news to her husband and teenage sons, of losing the ability to eat, talk or swallow, and of radiotherapy, which sounds like torture.
Despite all that, Fox’s writing brims with joie de vivre. She is a person with a healthy appreciation of nice things; she wears top-to-toe sequins for her MRI scan, completely redecorates her bedroom in preparation for her convalescence, and expresses horror than anyone would drink prosecco when they could have champagne. The weekend before she starts chemotherapy, she and her husband go for dinner at Scott’s in Mayfair, where she orders her ‘Death Row dinner’: an Old Fashioned cocktail, lobster thermidor, creamed spinach, skinny chips and a bottle of Saint-Veran. ‘This is it,’ she thinks. ‘This is heaven on earth.’
As Fox weaves the story of her childhood into the narrative of her illness, it becomes clear why nice things have been so important. Her mother died of cancer when she was young, leaving her and her sister and brother orphaned (their father had died a few years earlier). An older half-brother was supposed to act as guardian, but was a busy foreign correspondent with a family of his own, and an unsuitable choice. The three siblings became ‘animals in flight’; homeless and unprotected, feeling like a burden on those who cared for them, they were shunted between boarding school and the stately homes of various friends and distant relatives (poverty, you may gather, was not an issue — Angela’s Ashes this is not).
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