Miriam Engelberg, breast cancer, graphic memoir
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics, 2006, by Miriam Engelberg.
Suzanne Shea cued me in to this gem of a cancer memoir. It recounts the cancer journey of Miriam from symptoms to diagnosis of breast cancer to chemo to metastatic recurrence. What makes this memoir different is that the journey is told in cartoons. It’s a graphic memoir that brings humor into the presentation, and humor with cancer helps us keep our emotions from hardening.
Her humor is often self-deprecating, like Miriam really hating to throw up, and she will do anything to not hurl. This note shows up throughout the book — getting nauseous when other people talk about throwing up, hoping she doesn’t throw up during chemo, feeling relieved when she doesn’t throw up, and it being a good day when she doesn’t throw up. She thinks that the booklet that describes going through chemotherapy should include a photo of a toilet with the seat up.
She’s honest about what she’s thinking and feeling, as well as the different perspectives she brings into her narrative. She pokes fun at how other people react to her, what she thinks they are thinking behind the words they say, the medical reports, and her irony, although she’d rather work on her cartoons than do her ironing. In her intro she says that maybe “nobility and courage aren’t the only approaches to life with an illness; maybe the path of shallowness deserves more attention!” Hence the book’s title. And really, when you have cancer, you are consumed about getting through the here and now. While you’re still concerned about the environment, politics, and gun violence, most of your focus and energy is on getting through today without throwing up.
I love the freshness of this approach. She asks, Do we have to find meaning in our cancer? Is there something we’re supposed to learn from it? I doubt that any of us find meaning when we have a cold or the flu. Maybe cancer and its treatments just are, and the meaning we seek happens outside of them. Miriam felt pressure to use her cancer to do something, to turn her life around by meditating, journaling, and being reflective, but she decides that she’d rather watch TV.
Another gift from Miriam’s simple drawings is that readers might be encouraged to try cartooning about their cancer journey and include humor in their stories of cancer.
Miriam shares many of the thoughts that we have about why we got cancer, what caused it, our fears about what’s going to happen next, along with the dread of how we are physically going to feel during the treatments.
If you read her cartoons aloud, they come across as a stand-up comedy routine. There’s the statement, the counter-statement, the tongue-in-cheek, the reactions of others, her interpretation of their reactions, and the ruminations on the context of everything.
Some examples:
She thinks about designing breast cancer T-shirts that have an arrow pointing to the affected breast so that people know which breast to stare at.
When she was having a stereotactic biopsy, she had to lie face down on a special table, dangle her breasts through an opening, and felt like she was a car on a lift with a mechanic sliding under to work on her.
Her husband put a dark red lava lamp in her room, and she felt she was watching her liver and kidneys floating around in slow motion.
Her radiation technician had a hand puppet that was insanely cheerful.
For why she got breast cancer — was it from eating strawberries grown in pesticides instead of organic strawberries. Or was it from eating tofu, or not eating tofu?
Someone who hadn’t seen her since she began chemo asks, “How are you doing?” But their face says “How are you still alive!” Which makes Miriam feel like she has become the Undead.
I loved her Infomercial cartoon on getting her cancer news. “But wait, you not only have cancer, you also get Stage 4 cancer. And it has metastasized! We also throw in a new set of steak knives!”
One panel of cartoons pits the Pink Ribbon Gang against the Cancer Sucks Button Gang.
Miriam did die the year her book came out, after the cancer metastasized in her brain. About two-thirds of the way through, we realize this is probably going to happen. I’m grateful that she continued to take the time to share her thoughts and feelings about this when she realized this, too. She died Oct. 17, 2006, at age 48.
In her acknowledgements, Miriam includes a thank you to two cafés in San Francisco where she went every day to work on this book – The Grove and Café Venue. Writing about cancer in cafés is therapeutic. If I still lived in the Bay Area, I’d go to those cafés and thank the staff for taking care of her. And then I’d work on my book.
Important Note. In the 25 years since Miriam was diagnosed, cancer research has made great improvements in detection and treatment options, especially for breast cancer, and survival rates have significantly improved.
© 2026 Mark Liebenow
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