BEFORE I SAY GOODBYE

A sassy, brutally frank, and mercifully brief memoir of a British journalist’s 1997 decline and death by breast cancer, supplemented by e-mails and recollections from her family and friends.

At 32, a year after giving birth to twins, London Observer columnist Picardie discovered that a lump on her breast, previously diagnosed as a benign cyst, had become virulently malignant. Within months she learned that the cancer, which defied chemotherapy and less conventional treatments, had spread to her bones, lungs, and brain—and would soon kill her. After some soul-searching, she decided to write a column about her final days that would apply her flair for colloquial confession and shock humor (“you ram a carrot up the arse of the next person who advises you to start drinking homeopathic frogs urine”) to the messy agony of dying young. Expecting to be made thin by nauseating chemotherapy treatments, she was surprised when the steroids she was prescribed made her fat. Lashing out at patronizing acquaintances, clueless physicians, quack nostrums, and New Age gurus (referring to Andrew Weill, she snarls that “books by men with facial hair are not for me”), she finds solace in binge eating and spending lavishly on expensive makeup (“My non-beard book, Shop Yourself Out of Cancer, is coming soon”). So much fire-breathing sarcasm in the five short columns she managed to complete is balanced by confessions of terror, disgust, and lingering sadness (for herself and her children both) in various e-mails she exchanged with a female cancer sufferer and a man diagnosed with AIDS. Additional essays from her sister Justine and husband Matt Seaton portray Picardie as a complicated woman of uncommon brilliance and strength.

A slim but worthy addition to the literature of terminal illness.