Lopsided

Not your ordinary cancer memoir, this is the debut of a masterful humorist. Norton chronicles every step of her experience, starting with her bizarre symptoms while living in Paris to moving back home to California and living with her compulsive parents and their five television sets. Irreverent and incredibly funny, Norton rails against self-pity and victimhood and rants about the innumerable copies of Lance Armstrong's cancer survival book pressed on her by well-meaning family and friends: "If surviving this ... required any of the Lance-like traits, such as willingness to physically exert myself, I was as good as dead." Alongside the harrowing portrait of her treatments, Norton offers equally amusing memories from her offbeat life in an affluent African-American family as well as her marriage to a Frenchman.--From publisher description.