Foreword Book of the Year Award
Independent Publishers Award (IPPY)
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Publishing Triangle Award Finalist
GAMMA Award, Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southwest for "Getting the News," The Georgia Review, Summer 2009
Notable Essay of the Year Citation in Best American Essays 2010 for "Getting the News"
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Guerilla Girls On Tour and by WILLA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters
An extended meditation on the nature of love and the nature of time inside illness, Called Back is both a narrative and non-narrative experiment in prose. The book moves through the standard breast cancer treatment trajectory (diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation), with the aim of discovering unexpected vectors of observation, meaning and desire inside each phase of the typically mandated four-part ritual. A lyrical feminist critique of living with cancer at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, the book looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, eroticism, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Offering original exegeses of the work of Marsden Hartley, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust, Called Back relies on these artists' queer aesthetics to tease the author back to life. What might a person tutored as a reader of signs "see" inside breast cancer's paces, protocols, and regimes? What does the experience occlude, and what can we afford to liberate?
The first chapter paves the way for the book's central emphases: a meditation on the nature of "news" and the new, on noticing, on messages-including those that the body itself relies upon in the assumption of disease-and the interpretive methods we bring to them in medical crisis. Language is paramount for how we understand and act on the disease, how we imagine it, how we experience it, and how we treat it, Cappello argues.
Working at the borders of memoir, literary nonfiction, and cultural analysis, Called Back aims to displace tonal and affective norms- infantilizing or moralizing, redemptive, sentimental or cute-with reverie, rage, passionate intensity, intelligence, and humor.
Industry Reviews
Mary Cappello's Called Back shimmers on the page. Ezra Pound said a writer has to 'make it new,' and Cappello has done that rare feat. Cancer books have become a genre that nobody wants to read, except this book. Read this book. Called Back is exquisite. -- Patty Dann
There is no scarier moment than when the doctor looks at his feet, clears his throat, and mutters that you have cancer. The earth opens under you. After a while, most patients summon a remarkable courage to confront the relentless disease and the rugged cures. But few have summoned the clear-eyed, large-hearted intelligence that Mary Cappello has to describe the experience in harrowing, redemptive detail. With precision, passion, wit, and a poet's eye for the incongruous and devastating-that is to say, the human-she has written a book that will open your eyes and touch your heart. Called Back is an astonishing literary achievement. -- J. D. McClatchy
The momentum of Called Back . . . derives from [Mary Cappello's] extraordinarily capacious mind: her intelligence, wit, and emotional candor; the clarity and alertness of her train of thought; the restlessness of her style. Cappello makes stunning connections between literature, art, her life, medicine, cancer. A brilliant book. -- David Shields
I loved being offered the companionship of Cappello's feeling mind. I loved her insistence on taking everything in, not rushing to be 'healed' before experience registers. I loved the precision and passion with which this book about facing mortality attends to the particulars of being alive-both in the body and in language. -- Jan Clausen
