SOURCE: Woodward, Kathleen. “In Sickness and Health.” Women's Review of Books 16, no. 4 (January 1999): 2-4.

In the following review, Woodward compares A Season in Hell with Jane Lazarre's Wet Earth and Dreams, commenting that “[their stories are radically different, but neither one sentimentalizes the experience of suffering.”]

The risk of breast cancer for women in the United States is one in ten by the age of eighty; one out of every 55 women will get ovarian or primary peritoneal cancer; 85 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history of the disease … We live in a culture saturated with statistics that forecast our risk for diseases and deficiencies of all kinds. For many of us, these ever-proliferating numbers—especially those that predict the incidence of cancer—have come to haunt our sense of the future. After a routine pap smear, for example, who would not respond with...