When Gail Konop Baker showed up at an impromptu interview wearing a T-shirt like the one on the cover of her new memoir, Cancer Is a Bitch, we were curious: Between the cover artist and the T-shirt designer, who’d inspired who? She told us that the book’s cover had come about very late in the process, after she’d turned down four or five other ideas—until this design came along, she was sure they were going to wind up with a minimalist words-only cover à la Miranda July. “It was almost hard to look at at first,” she said of the highly stylized version of herself. “I thought, ‘Is that supposed to be me?'”
She was initially concerned about what readers might assume about the book through the cover art. “It’s not that girly of a book,” she explained, after we confessed that the image suggested a twenty-something hipster to us rather than a write-at-home mom in her mid-forties. “It’s funny, but it’s a sad funny, not joke-a-minute.” But the cover art ultimately proved inspiring; Konop Baker ordered a set of T-shirts like the ones her cartoon self wears to sell as a fundraising activity for Dresses That Heal, a non-profit organization in her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, that works to raise public awareness of breast cancer. (She was wearing one the afternoon we met, she explained, because she planned to drop in at a nearby yoga studio for a session after she was done signing stock at several downtown Manhattan bookstores.)
“I never ever even wanted to write a memoir,” Konop Baker continued. “I never imagined I’d be launching my career this way. This was not the big scheme.” She’d actually turned in the manuscript for a novel right around the time, nearly three years ago, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and for a long time after that, she said, “I couldn’t think at all. I was competely stunned and panicked… I was staring out the window and Googling obsessively.” Her husband bought her a journal, and eventually she opened it and began to describe what she was going through. “I was just writing to unload my brain,” she said of those first entries. “It made me shake and cry as I was writing.”
She sent some sample pages to two writer friends, Kristy Kiernan and Lolly Winston, who loved the material but, she told us, advised her to lose the title if she ever wanted to see it published. She started writing a column for the Literary Mama website tagged “Bare-Breasted Mama,” and when she was looking for a new agent, and Larry Weissman turned down her novel, but said complimentary things about her writing voice, she mentioned the column—and he soon wanted to see more.
For her next book, she’s planning “a raw, intimate, inside account of marriage,” and she’s not sure she’s ever going to go back to fiction. “I need to write about the world around me,” she explained. “I need to ground myself in my life.”