Los Angeles, California
August 2, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Aliza Pollack, a marketing consultant who lives in Los Angeles.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in aneditor’s letter that I was pleased that Open Letters seemed to be developing an episodic strain (as in the letters of X.and Chana Shvonne Williford), and I invited readers to write me if they found themselves “in the middle of an episode.”

A couple of days later, I got an email from Aliza, with the subject line “Have I got an ‘episode’ for you.” Her email began,

I am twenty-nine years old (just, just) and for the last six months have been going through chemotherapy and now radiation for Non-Hodgkin’s lymphona….Cancer, I have learned, is its own world. If you are not involved with it in some way, it has no bearing on your life. And why should it? Invincibility and all. However, if you’ve got the C key, you’re in.

I wrote back, and she and I began corresponding about what kind of letter she might be able to write from her new world of cancer. It wasn’t immediately clear how we should proceed – Aliza was nearing the end of her treatments, and so proposed writing about that, but I was interested in the story from the beginning. Aliza came up with a solution: she’d been writing letters – emails, actually – throughout the process, to a friend from school named Miriam, who was living in Europe. Aliza sent me those letters, and they seemed to me a far truer and more compelling version of the progress of her chemotherapy than anything she could possibly write retroactively; the first letter to Miriam, written six months ago, istoday’s letter.

Two or three more letters from that collection will follow over the next few weeks, until we catch up with Aliza’s current situation. Then she’ll take over in the present tense, and recount her episode as it continues.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough