The Diary of a Breast

"A nurse brought round a form and invited me to fill it in. I wrote: I live alone with two young children. I am about to get divorced. My son is at a school for children with difficulties. I think my mother is an alcoholic. I am a freelance writer and I am probably suffering from stress due to not getting any work."

In September 1991, Elisa Segrave discovered a lump in her breast. Over the next nine months, Segrave kept a disarmingly honest diary, documenting her treatment but also wryly evoking her troublesome family, her eccentric, cosmopolitan friends and fellow long-suffering NHS patients. The result is an immensely engaging mixture of truth and hilarity, privilege and deprivation, pleasure and pain.