Our Friend Laurie's Colon
The lunch lady and the school bus driver of newsletters is dusting off our dormant gray matter with a story we’ve been waiting six months to read.
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Spreadhive,
Just over a year ago, our friend Laurie Abraham—a fellow longtime Elle staffer who’s been a confidante, mentor, editor, after-work-margarita-swiller, and loyal hype-woman to us both1—told us that, at 60, she’d just found out she had colon cancer, discovered during a routine colonoscopy. She was set to have surgery, followed by six long months of chemotherapy. From what we could tell, she took all of this like a champ, her sense of humor never faltering. In January, slightly battered but far from beaten, Laurie graduated from the aggressive-treatment phase to the long wait-and-see of repeated testing to see if the cancer returns. So far, so good, thank goodness. A few months later, she told us she was writing a story about her cancer for New York. On the one hand, of course she was writing about it. On the other, a New York-level feature is no tossed-off assignment. It would mean delving into her disease—the one she was trying to put behind her—day after day, for months on end. It would mean bringing the most personal, private details about her body, all the feelings that colon cancer in particular brings up, and the most brutal statistics about her own survival out into the open. For Laurie, that all happened this morning, when the story went live online2. We were grateful to catch her for a prepublication chat about an article that will permanently change your understanding of this under-discussed disease, and—in a feat of magazine writing—is also a fast-paced and, dare we say, delightful read.
Plus, as always: This week’s Speadiest reads!
Love,
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. Is it true that Vanity Fair staffers are threatening to walk out if new EIC Mark Guiducci puts Melania Trump on the cover? Or is it just a scene from the Devil Wears Prada sequel? Regardless, we’d like to cast Andrew Rannells in the role of Guiducci, please and thank you. (Sure, Rannells is a teeny tiny bit older than the 36-year-old M.G., but the vibes are there.) Read the recent deep dive into the newly dawned Guiducci era in Semafor here.
Now, ladies and gentlemen! Please welcome Laurie Abraham to the stage… (Do we sound like Oprah, or do we sound exactly like Oprah?)
The Spread: This story covers so much ground—the statistics comparing this to other cancers, the step-by-step of your treatment and which parts of it went right and which went wrong. It’s a real public service you’re providing, talking about an illness that people—especially women—don’t openly talk about, despite the fact that it’s the second deadliest form of cancer. It feels like you managed to put a book's worth of information in an 8,200-word feature story.
Laurie Abraham: I had an initial theme about how actually being assigned this story, having to research my disease, was harmful to me, because it made me think about it all the time. It built my anxiety. For instance, I found out something that doesn’t necessarily have an effect on my prognosis, but I was talking to [American Cancer Society epidemiologist] Rebecca Siegel about my case—that I had had a colonoscopy at 50, and then another at 60, and they found this sort of flat ulcer tumor. And she said, “Oh, well, you, I’m sure you had that at 50, and they didn’t catch it.” That’s because it wasn't protruding; it was a flatter tumor. I don’t think that made it any more deadly—it was obviously a slow moving cancer. But God, I could have gotten it out back then!
The Spread: Can you talk a little bit about the toll of reporting on this? You really denied yourself denial, right?
Laurie: Yeah and I make clear in the story that denial is one of my coping mechanisms. I had to sink into my disease every day. Read more about it, find out things like—actually, when I really looked at the surgical pathology report, my tumor was very close to metastasizing. If I hadn’t had the story, I would not have known that, because I wouldn’t have looked up all the medical terminology. For someone who’s written a lot about medicine and health, I can for my own [health] just gloss over things. I felt a little stupid about some of the things that I hadn’t looked into.
The Spread: You found some hilarious studies about our aversion to the scatological stuff, and how gendered that is. Did writing about it help you get over that?
Laurie: You know that part where I write that I cringe as I’m writing this? I literally noticed myself making faces as I was writing. Then yesterday, when I recorded the audio version of the story for Apple News, I had to say those words out loud. And by the end, I was like, “anal, feces, rectum! Anal, feces, rectum!”—like they started to lose their meaning. So short answer, it has made the words less potent to me. It hasn’t stripped them of their potency, but it’s chipped into it.
The Spread: Did you let your nearest and dearest, who were characters in the story, read it first?
Laurie: Yes, I did, and my nearest and dearest were fine with it, moved by it. At one point, there was a little gnashing of teeth over my mentioning [my daughters’3] predilection for announcing their specific bathroom plans. [Laughs] But in the end, I guess they figured I laid it on the line more than they had, and they left it. Meanwhile my dad and my stepmom were so sweet to me during my treatment, sent me a card every week, paid for my cleaning. And here I was, like, writing about anal sex! I finally sent the story to my stepmom and I said, “Look, there’s stuff in here about my sex life that you guys might never have wanted to read.” She sent me a very nice email back.
The Spread: How are you feeling now about the waiting period versus the treatment period?
Laurie: Really, the period of waiting for test results [that I’m in now] is much more difficult emotionally than just gritting your teeth and getting through the chemo. During treatment, I just didn’t let myself think ahead beyond the next time I had to sit in that chair. When you’re getting a treatment, you feel like you’re doing something to fend off the disease. Now, you’re not doing anything, except running and pretending your healthy diet is going to save your life. My anxiety is definitely higher than it was during chemo.
The Spread: Would you write a book on this?
Laurie: I think it’s probably not good for me to spend the next year and a half of my life thinking about my colon cancer. I tell [my boyfriend] John, if I’m at all seduced, tell me I shouldn’t do it.
The Spread: A very important Spread question: Are you going to go back to blonde? Or embracing your new post-treatment white hair?
Laurie: I’m waiting. My hair is still very thin. But I think of myself as a blonde. I hope that by next January, to celebrate a year off chemo, I can go back to blonde. So we’ll see.
And now, for best of the rest…
Everybody’s got an opinion. She’s got more than most. Speaking of former Elle gals, friend-of-Spread Molly Langmuir pops up with a timely profile of fitness guru-turned-talking-head Jillian Michaels—a gay woman with a Black child who thinks we’re maybe making too big a deal about blaming white people for slavery. Are we reading too much into the article’s accompanying portrait, in which she looks like a sub-villain in a Joker movie?
Read “How Did Jillian Michaels End Up Here?” here.
Things that make you say, Hmmm. Meanwhile, from the other side of the aisle, 24-year-old social media star and all-round do-gooder Hope Walz (bahahaha for a minute there we thought this sweet nugget—who is not afraid to tangle with Laura Ingraham!—would be America’s second daughter!) is inexplicably video’d hiking and swimming in skimpy workout clothes for the paper of record?
Read “Her Dad Lost, but Hope Walz Hasn’t Stopped Speaking Out” here.
Remember when Trump declared himself the “father of IVF”? This was the week we officially stopped being able to ignore the phrase “restorative reproductive medicine,” as seen in the New York Times, the Cut, and our anger management sessions. This “natural” approach takes repro science back to the 1950s, claims to treat the “root causes” of infertility—which often has no discernible root cause—and leaves IVF as a last resort (many of its practitioners don’t offer IVF at all), thereby bypassing that whole messy “personhood” debate.
Read “What Is ‘Restorative Reproductive Medicine’?” in the Cut here. Read “As Trump Weighs I.V.F., Republicans Back New ‘Natural’ Approach to Infertility” in the New York Times here.4
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