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and pessimism, she decides to overcome her predicament. In an interview with Bethanne Patrick,
she describes that vixen means “Fearless, fabulous and just can take on anything including cancer.”
Thus, she is determined to “perceive [her]self as a victim but a vixen,” 11 right after the initial shock of
diagnosis.
After the diagnosis, instead of withdrawing from society, Marisa immerses herself further into
dining and outings with her Italian chef fiancée. She refuses change her New York upper‐class
lifestyle and continues with the preparations of her wedding and honeymoon. She does not remove
herself from the nightlife scene and her activities even when she is feeling down as a result of her
chemotherapy sessions. Although she complains about how others perceive sickness, she also uses
the situation to her advantage. She plays the cancer card to gain some favors like getting in or out of
social obligations by using her illness as an excuse.
Marisa also questions whether she was at fault for doing something wrong in her past. She
connects of her sickness to the 9/11 incident and the particles in the air during the time. 12 Later on
she dreams of being under attack by the Al‐Qaeda “cells.” 13 These thoughts are obviously culturally
conditioned. Susan Sontag criticizes the social conceptions of regarding the cancerous body as being
“under attack (“invasion”)” and the treatment as counterattack. 14 For Sontag illness is laden with
metaphors of war.
Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which to which body responds by
its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological “defenses” and
medicine is “aggressive,” as in the language of most chemotherapies. 15
The narrator talks about the changes to the body, hair loss, chemo, nausea, and she draws her
ordeals during her biopsy, scans, and mammography. These drawings become graphic renderings of
her feelings about the nature of her disease. Although Marisa focuses on how the treatment makes
her feel through drawing charts, she also strives to give an accurate account of the experience by
stating facts, such as the size of needle in the actual size. Her drawings of cancer cells as allegorical
and fable like creatures are notable. These cells are depicted as driving cars on the highway and are
unhappy for separating from the body they have started to conquer.
Couser talks about cancer memoirs falling under the category of comic narratives because “the
narrators are healed, if not cured. Without exception, then, the narrators are, or claim to be, better
off at the end than at the beginning.” 16 Nevertheless, as Herndl argues, not all cancer memoirs fall
under this categorization, as they are in‐between narratives with neither tragic nor comic endings.
She maintains, some of these narratives “do end on an upbeat note, but often that tone is shown to
be provisional, subject to unpredictable change.” 17 Last panels of CancerVixen illustrate the narrator
in a rainstorm in the car with her husband, which also suggests an unpredictable future, although the
narrator seems content with that uncertainty.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has been translated to many languages and has
become one of the bestselling graphic memoirs since its publication in 2006. The story focuses on the
dynamics between the family members during Bechdel’s coming of age. In the process, Bechdel tries
to understand and accept her father’s homosexuality while coming to terms with her queer identity.
She learns about her father’s well‐kept family secret through a telephone conversation with her
mother right after she announces her lesbianism to her parents. A few months later, her father is
accidently hit by a truck, suggesting a possible suicide. The enigmatic traffic accident and the startling
revelation of her father’s sexual preferences instigate Alison to look back and examine the family
relationships with renewed knowledge. In this narrative about remembering, the problematic of