cover image MY (SO-CALLED) NORMAL LIFE: How I Learned to Balance Love, Work, Family, Friends... and Cancer at 23

MY (SO-CALLED) NORMAL LIFE: How I Learned to Balance Love, Work, Family, Friends... and Cancer at 23

Erin Zammett, . . Overlook, $24.95 (239pp) ISBN 978-1-58567-643-9

Zammett had a job at Glamour , a cute boyfriend and a Manhattan apartment. She also had leukemia. Her memoir about battling cancer while also helping her sister plan her wedding and editing beauty and sex stories will provide young women in her predicament an account to identify with. Zammett tells her story as if she were recounting it to a girlfriend on the phone, and dwells on mundanities like family dynamics and her diet. Her humor is the book's strength; when she finds out her sister may donate bone marrow to cure her, she writes, "I made a mental note to start being nicer to Meghan." Laughter, not surprisingly, is an antidote to despair, yet real pain and suffering are largely absent from this memoir. Zammett mentions her weight more often than her mortality: "I'd find myself more anxious about the number of pounds I weighed than the number of leukemia cells swimming through my body." In the end, readers who've never experienced the profundity of a potentially deadly disease are left with no more insight, perhaps because Zammett isn't, either: "I also felt I had failed the disease in some way, failed to have that newfound perspective on life that I thought came with every diagnosis." Agents, Ed Victor and William Clark. (May)