Nearly Departed

Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences
(The Experiment, 9 July 2024)

by Gila Pfeffer

Interview by Anna Roins

Long before Angelina Jolie made the news of her double mastectomy, Pfeffer rid herself of her “ticking time bombs” to prevent the cancer that killed her mother and her grandmother.

Plot twist – she was diagnosed with cancer anyway.

NEARLY DEPARTED is the humourous and moving memoir of a woman who, at 30, was the oldest living member of her family and determined to change her family’s fate. A feat in storytelling, this warm and funny presentation of illness, surgery, and the discovery of BRCA Gene Mutation go from the shock of “foobs” — fake boobs — to concealing the chemotherapy from the kids, will engage you to the very last page.

The author, the charming, down-to-earth, and breathtakingly brave Gila Pfeffer, not only worked hard to save her own life, eventually facing cancer she thought she’d prevented, but she also decided to write a book about it and is now saving lives with her story!

Pfeffer’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Today.com, and elsewhere. Her monthly “Feel It on the First” campaign reminds women to prioritize their breast health on the first of the month.

AUTHORLINK: Gila, we were so very moved by your memoir, NEARLY DEPARTED: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences (The Experiment, 9 July 2024), and we thank you for sharing it with us! It gives the reader a sense of permission to feel however they feel when dealing with crisis and adversity. What made you decide to wrestle your thoughts down into a memoir? When did you start it, and did it help your healing process? Was it difficult to relive the past?

PFEFFER: Writing this particular story of loss and confronting my genetic destiny head on was less of a decision and more of a necessity. My need to share my experience crystalized on a cold January day in 2009 as I sat across from my oncologist for the first time. I was 35 years old and had been as preventative as anyone could be since losing my mom 15 years prior, even going so far as to have a preventive double mastectomy at a time when it was a not a well known procedure. I took drastic measures to avoid ever needing an oncologist in the first place yet there I was feeling both enraged and ridiculous. As she was advising me to buy a ‘fancy’ wig (by which she meant a good quality one rather than a polyester mop from a drugstore) I thought “I’m going to write a book about this and it’s going to be funny”. In terms of when I started, that depends where you’re counting from. I took a few halfhearted stabs at it by enrolling in memoir writing classes ten years ago (no one shall ever see those drafts!) but I got serious about the book in 2021 when I hired an outstanding book coach to help me draft a solid proposal. That’s when it finally felt like I was going to see my goal through. I really did think that I was over the loss and grief I was writing about but as I interviewed friends and family to test my memories against theirs, I realized that there were some things I’d been suppressing for a long time. The only way it has helped my healing process is that publishing my story forced me to examine some of these long hidden feelings. When I turned in the final edits I was diagnosed with a serious bulging disc that had been bothering me for months so my body would like you to know that, yes, it WAS difficult to relive the past! I also narrated the audio book and found reading my story out loud to myself in a studio to be much more intense and slightly traumatic than I’d expected.

 AUTHORLINK: That’s interesting about your suppressed feelings and somatic healing. We surrendered to your creative expression. We found it immediately familiar, funny and compelling at the same time. How many drafts did you write before you felt it was ready to be seen by your, a. first reader (who is that, by the way?) b. your agent, and c. the editor at your publishing house?

PFEFFER:  I landed an agent and sold my book on proposal which included two full chapters (one of which didn’t even make it into the final book!) but I went through at least ten drafts of each chapter and got as many high quality beta readers on them as I could. My journalist friend Lea (a longtime media exec and talented writer herself) was my first reader and her brutal honesty made my early chapters a million times better. By the time my agent saw my proposal she said it was in near perfect shape to go out on submission so my eventual editor saw the same. The five intense months I spent working on the proposal (as well as hiring a professional to guide me through some truly confusing waters) paid off. In terms of the actual manuscript, I spent seven months writing the full and six months in edits. Some chapters were a breeze to edit and some made me regret I’d ever decided to write a book in the first place.

 AUTHORLINK: What an accomplishment! Determined to shield your children from the fact that their mother had cancer and to protect them from the terror you had experienced with both of your parents, you say, “I didn’t tell my kids about the cancer until a decade later – they were age one, three, five, and seven when I had my double mastectomy. I told them I was having surgery to stay healthy and prepared them for the fact that I would need to recover for a while. Instead of using the emotional energy to tell them something that I would have to help them through, I used my energy to get through it myself and be there with them the best I could.”

“My way of coping was to keep it from them.

Have they read your book? Did you have any feedback?

PFEFFER:  Three out of my four adult and teen kids have read the book (I gave each of them an inscribed copy before leaving on my book tour this past July) and I’m working on the fourth kid. Their feedback surprised me in how thorough and thoughtful it was. Aside from being super proud of their mom, they each gravitated toward different details in the story and two of them got really emotional. Sometimes they’d try to reconcile what they read with memories they had from when they were little. It was cathartic for me to be able to fill in those gaps now that they’re grown. They hadn’t read much of my writing until the book and they were surprised by how my writing could make them laugh out loud (and also cry). Overall, they loved it. One of my sons- a talented writer himself- said it was ‘well written’ and I loved that.

 AUTHORLINK: That’s wonderful. Your detailed journey has given voice to those unable to capture so eloquently into words, terror and torment rolled into one because of this (what should have been by now) curable disease. What have you discovered in the advances of complete healing from breast cancer in your work as the founder of ‘First Day of the Month’? We love your campaign, ‘Feel it on the First,’ on the first day of the month and all your photos showing you holding different paraphernalia, balloons, flowers or saucepans around your chest area to help breast check awareness. Can you tell us how you got this all started?

PFEFFER: Ok so full disclosure, I’m not the founder of the Feel It On the First movement (I discovered this when I thought of the phrase and saw the hashtag already existed!) but it was a little populated hashtag so I got busy posting once a month, consistently and now it’s been close to six years. My intention was to use humor to share monthly reminders in the hopes that this would make the concept of breast cancer prevention less scary. From what I can tell, it’s working! My audience has come to associate me with the campaign and regularly DM me photos of everyday objects that look like boobs with a note saying “this made me think of you”. Even more significant are the messages from women who say my monthly reminders led them to do a self exam during which they found a lump. They reported following up with visits to their doctors and in some cases, a diagnosis of breast cancer but at a much earlier stage than had they not been as vigilant. On my website (gilapfeffer.com) I have an entire page dedicated to photos from my Feel It campaign and a link for people to email me some of their own.

 

AUTHORLINK: Bravo! Tell us about your writing journey. Have you ever tried to write a memoir before? A fiction novel? Were you a diarist? Perhaps a journalist? Tell us about the arc of your writing journey and any challenges you may have faced.

PFEFFER: I think I’ve always been a writer, but it wasn’t until later in life that I published my writing. From passing carefully worded notes in class designed to make my friends laugh out loud and get scolded by our teacher, to being the editor of my high school literary journal, the art of the word has been my chosen method of expression. As for diaries, I’m the worst at those. I have a handful of hardcover notebooks from my youth which begin with ten or so angst filled pages before they go blank. It would have been very helpful to have diaries while writing my memoir; fortunately I have something nearly as good: a steel trap memory.  As for my writing journey,  was lucky to have a mentor who’s a seasoned publishing industry pro to guide me and when I said I wanted to write a memoir she warned me about how difficult it would be to write and then sell it. When that didn’t deter me, she advised me to start a blog to get comfortable with making my writing public and in 2018 I launched the now defunct The Mom Who Knew Too Much where I shared funny anecdotes about my kids and my personal life. This gave me the confidence to try my hand at pitching personal essays and satire pieces (my favorite things to write!) and I also took lots of online classes with published authors. These classes were also great for networking with other writers. My main challenge was and still is the challenge of lots of writers- the rejection by editors. It wears on you, but it also makes landing piece feel all the more rewarding. I also want to add that I learned how important it is to have some kind of audience and influencer network already set up if you want to have any hope of selling a memoir (and you’re not famous). I spent five years building an engaged audience and befriending people who run much bigger accounts than mine on Instagram before even attempting to get started on a book proposal. I appreciate everyone who shows up to hear what I have to say on the app and never take their presence for granted.

 AUTHORLINK: Your husband, Phil, played a large part in your ability to emotionally survive your quest for physical survival, and the support he provides is a guide to any spouse who is watching a loved one in pain. It is also a love story of parent to child and sister to siblings, a desperate crusade to protect them from pain, suffering, and even the hands of fate. Tell us more about this.

PFEFFER: We all learn from our environments; sometimes we decide to emulate what we see and other times we realize that survival depends on going in the opposite direction (as I did in the case with my own parents). As the oldest of five kids (and the oldest living member of my family by the time I was 30) I felt a tremendous responsibility to model good behavior for my younger sisters. After my diagnosis, two of them went on to test positive for BRCA and have preventive mastectomies in their 20s. Had I not been found to have cancer they would have not chosen my preventative route so I feel like in saving my life, I saved theirs too. As for my kids, they were very little when I had my initial surgery so I told them I was having an operation to stay healthy. I was not expecting to have to explain cancer and chemo and my sudden baldness to a 7,5,3 and 1 year old so for me, the best thing to do was hide it from them and keep things as normal at home as I could. (This of course took a lot of help from family and friends) It meant I didn’t have to shoulder their fears and anxiety and could use my energy to deal with my own while still showing up as their mom every day. Keeping things normal was helpful for me too. It allowed me to escape my frustrating reality sometimes.

 AUTHORLINK: Yes, this makes perfect sense. You said once, “I don’t look at it as a fight because it’s not a fair fight.” It certainly isn’t. We learn about your religion and acknowledge the rituals gracefully in your memoir – and it’s very engaging. Thank you for being such a comprehensive note-taker! How do you feel about your Ashkenazi Jewish religion and background?  The statistic of that 1 in 40 Ashkenazi Jewish women has a BRCA gene mutation was very sobering.

PFEFFER: I’m very proud to be an Ashkenazi Jewish woman and am raising my family with the same traditions and values my parents passed to me (and their parents, all four Holocaust survivors, passed to them). I realize that being Ashkenazi comes with a higher risk of being a BRCA carrier, but I’m lucky to have this knowledge because knowledge really is power. Learning about my genetic makeup allowed me to save my life. There are so many organizations that work tirelessly to educate Jewish communities about their risk of being BRCA while also providing genetic counseling to help carriers make the best decisions for themselves. I already know of several Ashkenazi families that have opted to ensure that the BRCA was removed from their embryos before carrying their pregnancies to term. It is entirely possible to drastically reduce, if not eliminate the mutation from our lineage altogether and that gives me so much hope. Until then, there are plenty of preventive options carriers can choose. I should know, I’ve done them all.

 AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next? Can you tell us a bit about it?

PFEFFER: NEARLY DEPARTED has only been out for a few months so right now I’m still very much focused on marketing the book via interviews (in the US and UK where it was recently released), book clubs, podcasts and speaking engagements. I spent so long bringing it to life, I’m not quite ready to turn my attention toward something else yet, but when I do it will likely be more satire/humor pieces in publications like The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. I’m growing my Substack (which is called FEELIN’ IT, naturally) and jotting down ideas for my next book. My prediction is that I’ll always write nonfiction because I see humor and valuable life lessons in the everyday that I could never make up from my already overactive imagination.  

 AUTHORLINK: That’s great! And finally, what is one question you have always wanted to be asked but haven’t yet?

PFEFFER: “Hey, Gila, can you help me with my trigonometry homework?” I’m terrible- TERRIBLE- at math but have secretly always wanted to be good at it.

 AUTHORLINK: Ha ha ha! Gila, thank you so much for sharing your story with us today. We wish you every success for NEARLY DEPARTED and admire your courage and wit in facing such difficult life challenges.

PFEFFER: It was my pleasure, thanks for having me here! My hope for NEARLY DEPARTED is that it gets into the hands of readers who have been touched in some way by cancer or who just really enjoy a laugh/cry out loud memoir.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Gila Pfeffer is a Jewish American humor writer and essayist who harnesses the power of laughter to combat adversity. She is the author of the reluctantly inspirational memoir Nearly Departed: Adventures In Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences. Her work includes the widely shared McSweeney’s piece “An Open Letter to Tiffany & Co. About Their Advertising Campaign for the Ring That Helps Women Remember They Survived Cancer.”  She has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Today.com, Oprah Daily and more. Gila is a fifteen year breast cancer previvor and survivor. Her “Feel It on the First” campaign uses tongue-in-cheek photo and video reminders to prioritize breast health and has directly led to earlier diagnoses and treatment for some very grateful women. She only recently became comfortable admitting she’s from Staten Island, and currently splits her time between London, New York City and Instagram. Her name is pronounced like “Hava-nagila.”