Tonight I’m trashing the American Cancer Society’s dietary guidelines: Instead of eating plenty of fruits and vegetables I’m going to drink as much alcohol as I can stomach, smoke as much dope as I can inhale, and get as many women—and gay men—to touch my breast as possible. This is it, my going-out-of-booby sale! Come Monday this little gem will be gone, so I want her last voyage to be spectacular.

Writer Tania Katan’s "going-out-of-booby sale" occurred when she was twenty-one years old. Like my mother, who was also diagnosed with breast cancer at twenty-nine, Katan was told by her doctor that she was too young to have cancer, that it was probably just a cyst: "A junky cyst, huh? I kinda like the sound of that, like my cyst wears a beret, smokes colorful European cigarettes, and shoots up heroin for fun." Also like my mother, Katan awoke from surgery to have her future realigned. That golf ball/softball-sized junky turned out to have a much greater agenda.

A henna-hued halo puffs around my mother’s face, frozen in a photograph lined up on a breast cancer survivor conference flyer on my desk. She’s radiant in the photo, but her lack of hair, especially compared to the other four "survivors" pictured, is conspicuous. Unlike them, this is her fourth battle with cancer; it is year three of continuous chemotherapy since the cancer metastasized. Her humor, however, frequently takes on the bitter, wry commentary that makes Katan’s memoir so irreverently funny ("My surgeon’s name is Dr. Cutter. Talk about getting to the point"). My mother rejected the wigs early on, choosing instead to bare her downy head—screw the averted eyes. My mother puts on a brave front, but privately, she is frail. The last time I visited, she wandered into the kitchen for coffee, teetering slightly, and I had a fleeting memory of my late maternal grandmother. Katan, too, alternates between fragile and bold.

Nearly a decade passed between diagnosis number one for Katan and diagnosis number two. Katan’s remaining breast will soon be a scar, part of a matched set. At thirty-one, she’s torn between saving her life and living her life: "Maybe I can still save you? We could run away together. We’ll go to Vegas. We’ll elope. After our seven-minute ceremony performed by Elvis, we’ll cram into a photo booth, I’ll lift up my shirt, and we’ll make silly faces expressing our love for one another in six black-and-white frames." She ends up going through with a second mastectomy, though, (after filling out the form she misreads as "Advanced Health Care Detective," which results in a funny, lengthy tangent about a "gritty young lesbian sleuth" searching for a lost breast) and goes on to recount her recovery in equally funny detail.

Katan has an oddball assortment of a support system: her French mother and Jewish father, pot-smoking brother, and younger sister come together for her second surgery, while her latest ex-girlfriend in a string of "toxic" women floats in the background breaking into her email account. Coincidentally, Sal (girlfriend 2002) is just like Dawn (girlfriend 1992). Both lovers are the lump-finders, which, in Katan’s opinion, makes sense, since they were both lumps, too. Ultimately, it is Katan’s family and her growing relationship with Angela, an artist, that gets Katan through her most recent surgery.

Good memoirs, in my opinion, have very little to do with the life experiences the writer is recounting, but instead rely heavily on the writer’s perspective and talent. Some of the best memoirs I’ve read were about fairly ordinary lives. What made them extraordinary was the way the writers reflected on those lives and the way they chose to share them with a reader. Nothing is more frustrating than reading about a person who went through something incredible, then ineptly attempted to write about it. Katan structures her memoir in a way that both emphasizes the parallels between the two incidents while allowing her personal growth to shine through. Don’t get me wrong, though, Katan’s growth as a writer, daughter, and girlfriend doesn’t diffuse her insouciant wit. She’s clearly someone I could sit down with for a coffee chat (or a cosmo) and still be sitting there hours later, cheeks aching, with plenty left to say.

I think the first question I would ask Katan is her perspective on elective (preventative) radical mastectomy. Perhaps I’m just more aware of the option now that my mother’s cancer has returned, but it seems that every health magazine I pick up recently has some young woman’s (curious? courageous?) choice to remove her breasts before they become cancerous. Like me, they have a strong family history of cancer. I have a feeling Katan would understand the choice. After all, she wrote, "OK, options: No breast equals the chance of no cancer. Three quarters of a breast and an entire nipple equals the potential for more cancer. No breast equals living. Three quarters of a breast and an entire nipple equals dying. How often do I really use my breast anyway? And my nipple? Actually the nipple would be nice to save; she is an erogenous hot spot, but then again, should I reserve my right to be sexually aroused at the expense of my life?" While the pre-cancer Katan would have probably thought I was crazy for even considering it, wiser Katan might understand. Every time I read their stories, I think to myself, "I could do this. It’s a rational, proactive, decision." Ironically, it is not the breasts I will miss. It would be the feeling of unearned awkwardness when the scars are revealed. Like I didn’t fight for them the way my mother and Katan have. I know: weird.

"It’s Sunday morning, 6 a.m., and really cold outside. If I had nipples, they’d be hard now [. . .] I have two goals for this 10K: to run the entire 6.2 miles in less than an hour, and to do it without my shirt on [. . .] In deciding to bear it all, or at least half, I want to present a healthy body in a different form." Katan’s bare-chested, triumphant run is an incredibly moving and inspiring way to draw her memoir to a close. However, she and her partner, performance artist Angela Ellsworth, continue to collaborate, write, entertain, and educate on the West Coast. My One-night Stand with Cancer is truly a must-read.