After going to the doctor to try and resolve her back issues, 32 year old Catherine Pioli discovers her platelet and red and white blood cell counts are alarmingly low. She’s eventually diagnosed as having acute lymphocytic leukemia - Down to the Bone is the account of her experience from diagnosis through the months of agonising treatment.
Down to the Bone is a very thorough but accessible memoir about a difficult subject. I also found it to be compelling and surprisingly moving.
Reading about cancer treatment is nobody’s idea of a good time, not least because you probably know at least one person who’s gone through it, or you’ve gone through it yourself, so it’s addressing a very real trauma for most of us. And yet this book is so unputdownable in large part because Pioli herself has such a great attitude and sense of humour about her plight, that it renders the subject toothless to a degree.
It helps that she was an excellent cartoonist. There’s a good balance between the visuals and the text, and I loved the spare aesthetic of white page background throughout with only minimal colouring used (usually just Pioli herself being coloured in while the others remain black and white - like the cover). It’s a style I’ve noticed many female French cartoonists use and it’s so elegant.
I don’t consider this a spoiler - I can’t be the only one who notes details on the publication history page, ie. the author’s dates (usually just their birth year followed by a dash), so I saw right off the bat that Pioli had a birth and death date: 1982 - 2017. And yet, even when the book suddenly stops and there’s a line telling you that Catherine didn’t make it, it’s still a really powerful moment.
Because she’s so upbeat and irreverent throughout, I sorta forgot the dates on the publication page that preceded the book, and thought I was reading a memoir by a survivor. It’s only towards the end that the tone shifts from optimistic to… not. Like when Pioli draws herself as a skeleton, it’s quite a shocking moment as you realise, oh, there’s not that many pages left and things have gotten really bad for her. It’s still upsetting and really brings home the seriousness of what the author was going through, regardless of the peppy way she wrote about it, and that abruptness conveys the suddenness of death so effectively. And that moment is all the more moving because Pioli wins you over so effortlessly that you’re rooting for her to recover and live happily ever after right from the start.
The only parts of the book I didn’t totally love were the detailed medical processes she went through. It’s informative if you’re looking to understand the steps of these complex procedures but to me it was like reading pages from an illustrated medical manual, so they were a tad tedious.
Still, it’s so impressive that she was able to pull all of this together in spite of how clearly debilitating the treatment was to her strength. It shows you exactly what the experience of this disease is like from the realities of treatment, its after-effects, and how it changed her life. What a brave soul she was - I know if I were stricken with the same illness, I’d just fold into myself and give up; Catherine Pioli rose up to give us this last great book and the culture is poorer for having lost a talent like hers.
The book was published in her native French a few years ago and is just now being published in English. An enthralling account with a gut-punch of an ending, Down to the Bone is a remarkable comic that’s well worth checking out.
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