Symmetry in Life and Art: Writing About Cancer In The Time Of COVID

I began The Transit of Lola Jones many years ago, in the wake of my first bout of breast cancer. Note the key word: first. I’ll return to that, noting that Art and Life often circle each other in a bizarre relentless dance. The journey of Lola Jones from frantic energetic beginnings to publication was long, much longer than I had anticipated, not withstanding all I had read about how long it takes to get published.

The Transit of Lola Jones is about a breast cancer survivor, who is in that first five years after treatment, still seeing her oncologist, drugs still swirling through her system: the all clear hasn’t been given and the shadow of death hovers over her 42 year old self. This is a complex state to be in.

You’re relieved that the trauma of surgery, chemo and radiation is over; your hair is growing back; your nails are regaining their strength; you are regaining strength; your appreciation of life is on high beam. You do your best to ignore the bubbling fear that you are not cancer-free, that it may come back at any moment. You believe if you focus on the positive, take joy in the things that matter – your family, your home, your friends and animals – then things will be okay. Thus, you do your best to get back to life as it was, to regain some normalcy. 

But are you ever the same after such a life-threatening event?

That was part of the question I wanted to explore with Lola Jones. She is confronted with an old lover, from a time when she was young and foolish, before she met her husband. He tells her something terrible and wonderful and as a result, she chops off his penis and he dies. But, as the novel explores, how responsible is she? Are the drugs addling her thoughts, has the cancer spread to her brain, leading her to such an out-of-character action, or has having cancer irrevocably changed her?

The novel began well, based on my own cancer experiences, but taken to an imaginative what-if? place, and then it stalled. And it stalled for years. I couldn’t progress the story with my main murder suspect as the narrator. What to do? So I wrote other things, completed a PhD, moved across the world. But Lola nagged. She wouldn’t be ignored. Then I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Her unreliable narrator and switching narrative voices gave me my way through. Enter the reluctant shambolic detective, Todd Rains: the voice of reason, logic and sense. His absolute honesty balanced Lola, and so between them, the story could proceed.

The novel was duly finished and left alone. Revised and edited: read by a trusted few. Revised yet again, then sent out into the world. To nothing. Lola spent several years going out to agents, small publishers, all to a resounding silence. I wasn’t surprised. This is the way of publishing. I am a complete unknown. A modest publishing CV, a scattering of prizes here and there, but nothing consistent or big or shiny enough. Who was I?

But then I found Fahrenheit Press, a small Indy firm who specialised in noir. They present a very punk persona to the world. Was I punk enough? I’d had bright pink hair for years. After cancer, my lovely blonde hair came back completely white and I couldn’t face how much it aged me, so coloured my hair henceforth. I’d managed to get away with it in a conservative work environment (education) for years. I said fuck too often and sometimes to the wrong people.

Happily, we were a match. A cheery email was followed by a lengthy and hugely positive phone call. I was on my way. Contract signed, full speed ahead. That was late July 2019. Publication was slated for Spring 2020. I was being mentioned in dispatches. It was very exciting.

Then the world went pear shaped. My heroine was recovering from her first bout of cancer but mine had come back. I was half way through the follow up to The Transit of Lola Jones (there’s a series in various stages of readiness) when I found myself back in hospital – another operation and then chemo. And then COVID hit.

The world went into lock-down and everything stopped. My lovely book, along with so many others, was put on indefinite hold. There were messages from Fahrenheit worrying about their survival. It was the last thing I wanted to hear. In the midst of chemo, which thankfully hadn’t been stopped, it was one of the few things keeping me going, keeping me hopeful about the world. I fretted.

What if, after all this time, Lola sank without a trace? What about my series, my future as a published writer? I couldn’t see how I’d have the energy to go through that grinding heart-break of submission and rejection ever again. My wise writing buddy in Oz, assured me all would be fine, and besides, she said, I really didn’t have the energy for anything to do with getting a book out into the world, so perhaps it was for the best.

Perhaps it was. The Transit of Lola Jones is due for publication on Friday 4 December 2020, a few days after a not insignificant birthday. It’s felt completely surreal to have my novel about my cancer-surviving heroine published as I navigate my way through my second bout. But it reminds me that the world is full of odd symmetry, as Lola, herself would observe, and that Life and Art are often difficult, and too closely aligned to easily pull apart.

Find my blog at: Jactherat – Ephemera, lies & chocolate: https://jactherat.wordpress.com

Follow me on Twitter: @jactherat

More information about The Transit of Lola Jones can be found here: https://fahrenheit-press.myshopify.com/collections/coming-soon/products/the-transit-of-lola-jones-jackie-swift

Author Bio:

Jackie Swift has been an English teacher for all of her working life, running successful English Departments across the world, doing her best to foster a love of reading and writing in her teenage charges; sometimes even succeeding! She’s accumulated an excess of degrees over the years, including a PhD in Creative Writing.

She won her first prize for writing aged 10 and has been writing ever since: publishing articles, short stories and poetry; winning the odd small prize along the way. She has completed several novels, most remain unpublished. Her debut novel, The Transit of Lola Jones is published by Fahrenheit Press on December 4, 2020 and is the first in a series.

She is inordinately fond of her three children, German Shepherds, wombats and polar bears. An Australian marooned in London with her £10 Pom husband, she is determined to return home some day to sit on her riverbank, surrounded by dogs and grand-children, drinking wine, growing vegetables and roses, writing (always writing), and putting the world to rights.

THE TRANSIT OF LOLA JONES

Debut author Jackie Swift brings some playfulness to the Fahrenheit list with this first book in a series featuring her eponymous hero Lola Jones.

Lola Jones’ life is not turning out the way she expected it to.

As the book opens we find Lola recovering from the breast cancer that threatened to prematurely end her life and languishing in a police cell, the main suspect in the murder of businessman Daniel Blain.

As the truth begins to unfold about the events leading up to the untimely demise of the dashing Daniel, we learn more about the journey that brought the normally infectiously vivacious Lola Jones to such an unsatisfactory pass.

But is she guilty, and even if she is guilty, is she to blame?

This is a funny, smart, sexy, modern romp of a book and Lola Jones is a character that you’ll instantly want to be your best friend. If you’re a fan of Fahrenheit legends Derek Farrell + Duncan MacMaster we guarantee you will absolutely love this book.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing