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Review [published June 1999]
John Diamond: C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too
Gary Marshall
As far as John Diamond was concerned, cancer happens
to other people. A columnist who is paid handsomely
for spouting off each week about whatever is on his
mind, he undergoes tests for the lump in his neck and,
rather than panicking, sees it as a potentially interesting
anecdote. “I imagined myself in a week or two’s
time not as someone who had been diagnosed as having
cancer but as someone who had had a close brush with
cancer – who’d been through all the tests and then at the
very last minute been given the all clear. If anything it
sounded even more heroic than the real thing”. By this
point Diamond had had cancer for more than a year.
C is, of course, about cancer – what it is, what it feels
like to receive the diagnosis one evening as you’re
watching Eastenders, how it feels to lose four stone
and most of your tongue. Subtitled “because cowards
get cancer too”, the book makes no attempt to portray
Diamond as some brave, heroic figure and describes
his twisted pleasure as he uses his illness as a weapon at
dinner parties, his frequent outbursts of impotent rage
and the often appalling way he treats his wife during
his convalescence.
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This is no self-pitying, ‘poor me’ tale. Diamond describes
how cancer works, clear-up rates, the different
sorts of treatment and their chances of success. A savagely
perceptive writer, he pours vitriol on new-agers
and pro-smoking campaigners in equal measure. “By
all means campaign for some phantom ‘right’ to smoke,
but don’t believe that right derives from corrupting the
statistics about what smoking does to you. Understand
it for what it is: the right to play Russian roulette, as I
did, with the immune system”. Diamond’s descriptions
of his predicament are frequently hilarious – his inventory
of his well-stocked medicine cabinet reads like P.J.
O’Rourke, albeit P.J. writing about morphine instead
of cocaine.
Diamond reserves his most vicious criticism for those
who believe surviving cancer is a matter of the correct
mental attitude, as if those who die simply didn’t try
hard enough. As he recounts his treatment through his
weekly newspaper column he receives regular missives
from the terminally stupid, “the ones who told me that
as a journalist with a public platform it was my bounden
duty to stop operating as a propagandising dupe for the
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