Eloquent and passionate, All In is a queer feminist memoir of cancer and what it means to survive.
After years of experiencing painful periods that she was led to believe were normal, Caitlin Breedlove was diagnosed with ovarian cancer—the deadliest of all gynecological cancers, which disproportionately impacts queer women, trans men, Jewish women of Eastern European descent, and older women. As she writes, “It feeds on those who can’t go to a doctor and those who convince ourselves we do not need to.”
Thrust into a series of major surgeries amid the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Breedlove lingered at the edges of the living and made a deal with her ancestors: if she lived, she would write for them and all the suffering in her lineage that had gone unnamed.
With the generous and community-minded heart of an organizer, Breedlove chronicles harms caused by our profit-driven health care system, and explores the rigors of single parenting while living with chronic illness; the medical neglect that women, the LGBTQ+ community, and others on the margins experience; and her challenges with addiction. And, like Audre Lorde and Barbara Ehrenreich, she calls out the insidious impact of “toxic positivity” on women who live with cancer. The result is an intensely powerful narrative about the connective potential of grief and forging a new life.
What People Are Saying
"In this beautifully written and deeply honest book Caitlin Breedlove brings us on her harrowing journey through cancer. With unflinching emotional, spiritual and political insight, she offers lessons about struggle for us all." Barbara Smith, author of The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom
"Wrestling with what it means to hold death and life in a body with cancer, this is an offering of raw, unfiltered truth of recovery, transmutation, cancer and life. Her words are a salve for all hearts and medicine for survivors. As well as a blueprint on how to navigate systems of reproductive care when the constellation of queer/trans/femme bodies has been collapsed and forgotten. " Cara Page, author of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety
"Required reading for anyone longing to make a wider way for love and justice in the world. Standing in the tradition of our feminist foremothers—think Audre Lorde, think June Jordan—Caitlin allows her particular life-threatening experience to inform a politics already rooted in what it means to show up in one's fullness, no matter the circumstance. I was at once shattered and challenged by the unflinching glimpse she provided of life's fragility and fierceness." Lisa Anderson, Vice President of Auburn Seminary and founding director of the Sojourner Truth Leadership Circle
About the Author
Caitlin Breedlove has been organizing, writing, and building movements in red states for the last twenty years, and working across lines of race, class, culture, gender, sexuality, and faith. All In is her first book.
adrienne maree brown (foreword) is a New York Times best-selling author. Her works include Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Fables and Spells, and Grievers. brown grows transformative ideas in public through her writing and art; she is a poet changing the world.