Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s CANCER VIXEN is believed to have nabbed the highest advance ever for a graphic novel but it looks like it’s earning its keep, with a movie deal in place before it’s even released, on Tuesday.. Cate Blanchett has signed on to star in the movie version of Marchetto’s battle with breast cancer.
Marchetto’s autobiography, which has been generating buzz ahead of its release by Knopf on Tuesday, describes how she fell in love with a celebrity restaurateur and was planning their wedding when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and realized that she had let her health insurance lapse. Her friends — stylists, gossip columnists, designers — rallied around her as she wore killer shoes to chemo sessions and strove to get married on time.
Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, are in talks to serve as producers of the Working Title Films project.
Marchetto also write to tell us that she’ll be using some of the money from the book to sponsor a a day of free mammograms for women who don’t have insurance at the hospital where she received her treatments: St Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.
That’s pretty darned swell of her, and she wanted us to pass the news along for any uninsured women cartoonists out there. We’ll pass along details as we get them.
That’s great. I’d heard of this book but didn’t know anything about it. Certainly hits home, for more than one reason.
There does seem to be a bunch of cancer-comics memoirs between CANCER VIXEN and Miriam Engelberg’s CANCER MADE ME A SHALLOWER PERSON and of course Brain Fries’ MOM’S CANCER and the now-classic Harvey Pekar/Joyce Brabner OUR CANCER YEAR. Makes me wonder if we’ve got an actual autobiographical-comics-about-disease sub-genre here. Or if comics about illness will become the new “disease-of-the-week-made-for-TV-movie” of years past.
Joking aside, we’ve all seen so many autobiographical comics to know that there’s something very therapeutic in the comics art form. Glad to see more people are taking advantage of it, and hope that their work helps their living/coping/healing process.
This book was fabulous! I could totally relate as I went through very similar cancer and treatments 5 years ago! An unbelievable inspiration and odd as it sounds but you can laugh to a book on breast cancer!!
All must read it…Even those who have supported friends through this terrible time. Marisa and my mom are the same person!!!
Great job!!!