But cancer happens to everyone around the person that has it. The publishers wanted this grim book about one man’s battle with cancer and depression, where Harvey would lift the scab off this painful experience and wallow in it. We had a lot of people who were looking at this in progress who really didn’t understand what happened at all. “We lay out the fact that it’s tough, but you get through it. “This is a survivor’s story,” Brabner said. It’s a harrowing account of a particularly eventful year in the life of one couple, when everything seemed to fall apart-and how, eventually, it all worked itself out. Ultimately, he triumphs over the big C, but this is not a tale of heroics, nor does it revolve solely around the cancer. Pekar’s panic here is palpable, conveyed expertly by his existentialist writing style, and by Stack’s impressionistic artwork.

In a moment of sheer terror, he thinks time is running backward. I mean, they’re pouring poison in your body, you know? It weakened me to the point where I thought I’d never get my strength back.”Īmong the most memorable passages is a scene in which Pekar is at his lowest, hallucinating from a chemo treatment and believing himself on the verge of death. “And I wasn’t ready for what a toll really heavy, aggressive chemotherapy can take on you. You know, ‘God, this couldn’t happen to me.’ I completely freaked out. “I think that’s the same reaction most people have. “I (soiled) my pants when I was diagnosed,” said Pekar in a phone interview from Cleveland, with Brabner on the line. He whined and cowered, fell apart and contemplated suicide, while Brabner fought to keep her husband, herself and their world intact. Pekar didn’t react well, physically and especially emotionally, to the disease and chemotherapy/radiation treatments. It’s a thoroughly engrossing work, full of unvarnished humanity and often brutal honesty. The meat of the book covers the couple’s struggles when Pekar was found to have lymphoma in 1990, but also goes into Brabner’s work with refugee children from war-torn nations, the couple’s reactions to the Persian Gulf War, the hassles of buying a first home, and relationships with friends, family and associates during the period. Last fall, Four Walls Eight Windows released “Our Cancer Year,” Pekar’s first book-length work, co-authored with his wife, Joyce Brabner, and illustrated by longtime confederate and underground comics pioneer Frank Stack. Three volumes of his work have been released by Doubleday and Four Walls Eight Windows publishers, and a play based on his work, starring Dan (the voice of Homer Simpson) Castellaneta as Pekar, was a popular attraction in Los Angeles a few years back.

Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar