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of the royalties going to the Komen Foundation, is filled with such testimonies to the redemptive powers of the disease: “I can honestly say I am happier now than I have ever been in my life—even before the breast cancer”; “For me, breast cancer has provided a good kick in the rear to get me started rethinking my life”; “I have come out stronger, with a new sense of priorities.” 4 Never a complaint about lost time, shattered sexual confidence, or the long-term weakening of the arms caused by lymph node dissection and radiation. What does not destroy you, to paraphrase Nietzsche, makes you a spunkier, more evolved sort of person.

    Writing in 2007, New York Times health columnist Jane Brody faithfully reflected the near universal bright-siding of the disease. 5 She gave a nod to the downside of breast cancer and cancer generally: “It can cause considerable physical and emotional pain and lasting disfigurement. It may even end in death.” But for the most part her column was a veritable ode to the uplifting effects of cancer, and especially breast cancer. She quoted bike racer and testicular cancer survivor Lance Armstrong saying, “Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” and cited a woman asserting that “breast cancer has given me a new life. Breast cancer was something I needed to experience to open my eyes to the joy of living. I now see more of the world than I was choosing to seebefore I had cancer. . . . Breast cancer has taught me to love in the purest sense.” Betty Rollin, one of the first women to go public with her disease, was enlisted to testify that she has “realized that the source of my happiness was, of all things, cancer—that cancer had everything to do with how good the good parts of my life were.”

    In the most extreme characterization, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance—it is a “gift,” deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor turned author credits it with revelatory powers, writing in her book The Gift of Cancer: A Call to Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.” And if that is not enough to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells, she insists, “Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.” 6

    The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage—not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood. Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease: the diagnosis may be disastrous, but there are those cunning pink rhinestone angel pins to buy and races to train for. Even the heavy traffic in personal narratives and practical tips that I found so useful bears an implicit acceptance of the disease and the current clumsy and barbarous approaches to its treatment: you can get so busy comparing attractive head scarves that you forget to question whether chemotherapy is really going to be effective in your case. Understood as a rite of passage, breast cancer resembles the initiation rites so exhaustively studied by Mircea Eliade. First there is the selection of the initiates—by age in the tribal situation, by mammogram or palpation here. Then comethe requisite ordeals—scarification or circumcision within traditional cultures, surgery and chemotherapy for the cancer patient. Finally, the initiate emerges into a new and higher status—an adult and a warrior—or in the case of breast cancer, a “survivor.”

    And in our implacably optimistic breast cancer culture, the disease offers more than the intangible benefits of spiritual upward mobility. You can defy the inevitable disfigurements and come out, on the survivor side, actually prettier, sexier, more femme. In the lore of the