About My Book - 'TOUGH: Women Who Survived Cancer'
No Woman Should Have To Experience Cancer Alone . . .
TOUGH: Women Who Survived Cancer is the ultimate recovery companion for women facing any type of cancer.
TOUGH is an Award-Winning Finalist in the Women's Issues category of the
2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest
This book is for newly-diagnosed women, survivors, thrivers, & the people who love them. It makes a great gift!
Working from interviews with 37 women with a variety of cancer types, Iliev-Piselli, a survivor herself, has created honest and triumphant essays that will lift readers up like a conversation with good friends (if all your friends had survived cancer!).
During life's most difficult moments, these women found joy in creative pursuits as diverse as they are, including writing, stand up comedy, drawing, air guitar, and many more.
Get ready for honest, inspiring, uplifting, rock-n-rolling, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, chemo-brain-fueled tales about cancer and its aftermath.
‘TOUGH: Women Who Survived Cancer’
This book isn’t about me. It’s about the women I interviewed, whose stories made me fall in love with every one of them. Their guts and grit – and honesty – blows me away every time I read their essays. Still, I’ll tell you the Cliff’s Notes version of my story, because it introduces the inspiration and intent of TOUGH.
I’m Marquina – a mother, wife, digital marketer, breast cancer survivor, competitive air guitarist, insufferable karaoke singer, and all-around-goofball living in Brooklyn, NY. In September 2015, I found a small lump in my breast. Everyone said, “It's nothing.” But I end up getting a mammogram, sonogram, and biopsy. It was something alright. I was diagnosed October of 2015, and chemotherapy started November 1st. My last treatment was Halloween of 2016 and I’ve been in remission almost 3 years.
In the months after my diagnosis, I experienced uncertainty, sadness, anger, and pure fear. That fear caused me to retreat into myself. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about my diagnosis because it was too painful to relive with each retelling. Each time I would muster the courage to discuss what I was going through, I left the interaction feeling depleted and raw. At a certain point, I didn’t want to talk, walk, smile, or leave my bed. I was short-tempered with my husband and son. I felt stalled. Stuck.
When I started chemo, I knew that to get through it, I needed to find that one thing that could make going through treatment not sad anymore. I didn’t want to sit for eight hours a day doing nothing and being afraid. I landed on what I called Glam Chemo. I was donated fabulous dresses, jewelry, wigs and crowns. My friend, Eden Di Bianco, who is a make up artist agreed to come in and do my make up for some of my chemo sessions at Weill Cornell Hospital in NY. I put beautiful painted tattoos on my bald head. Casey Fatchett, the photographer who shot my wedding, took pictures of me looking…well, you can see for yourself if you Google “glam chemo” and People magazine, which did a piece on the story.
I didn't originally plan to go public with the pictures. They were for me, to turn my saddest day into my best day. I wasn’t getting chemo—no! I was in a photo shoot, smiling the whole time. It made it fun. The next day, of course, I always felt terrible. But two days later, Casey would send me the pictures and I’d think, Oh yeah. Amazing! I might have a raging headache right then, but I’d see the photos and know, Yeah, I can do this. It's okay. It's gonna be all right.
Every couple weeks I got dressed up and tried to make something special happen in those six to eight hours. It saved me. It saved my spirit. And it still is saving me, because now, I don't look back on that time with fear. Instead, I remember how my friends came together for me. My brother came and we re-enacted some of our childhood photos, which was hilarious—me in a baby bib or a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. My best friend came, and a bunch of fellow air guitarists came (air guitar being another one of my life-saving creative passions). We did trust falls in the lobby, which was not sanctioned. We did it because that's what air guitarists do. We do spontaneous, very, very safe, mildly crazy things.
I made the best out of chemotherapy I possibly could. Glam Chemo isn’t for everyone, but my experience made me wonder how other women got through it. It also made me want to encourage others to find their thing. It might be something they always wanted to do, but were stopped by fear or inertia. Or it might be something completely unknown to them, until they take the first step. It might be during treatment or after. The question is, what’s that one thing that can save you from sinking down into yourself and retreating from life? What can light you up, even in the worst times, and connect you to a community?
This line of thinking, along with my inability to find a book that served up a bunch of this kind of stories, lead me to create TOUGH. I went on a six-month journey to find and interview women who had embraced creative pursuits, or found otherwise inspiring ways to weather the emotional earthquake of cancer.
I found them! Their stories are as diverse as they are: writing, stand-up comedy, lip synching, furniture restoration, quilting, you name it! Working with an editor, I turned their interviews into essays, and the result is a giant, inspiring—but also, often raw—oral history of heroines. My hope is that through TOUGH, any reader can immediately surround herself with a circle of women who get it, and have wisdom to share.
Get ready for honest, inspiring, uplifting, rock-n-rolling, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, chemo-brain-fueled tales about cancer and its aftermath.
Visit Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com to purchase TOUGH: Women Who Survived Cancer.
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