We Got This
How I Learned to Thrive with Terminal Cancer
Focusing on positivity and empowerment, We Got This is a personable self-help guide about thriving after a cancer diagnosis.
Reflecting on her terminal diagnosis, Elissa Kalver’s memoir We Got This encourages redefining measures of success while living with cancer.
When Kalver was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic breast cancer at the age of thirty-four, she and her husband, who had a one-year-old-daughter together, were shocked. Exhausting treatments followed. But rather than despairing, Kalver chose to reevaluate her quality of life and focus on living.
Made up of poignant anecdotes and quippy self-help positivity, the book describes how Kalver’s efforts at self-empowerment led her to found WeGotThis.org, a nonprofit organization used as a registry for cancer patients. The prose is clear and direct, helping to make its discussions of fraught topics accessible. Advice is directed to others who have cancer and to those whose friends and family members do:
Embrace the knowledge that you, too, can stand in this place of unapologetic authenticity. You can make the deliberate decision to understand and appreciate the world around you from a wider, more all-encompassing perspective. This choice belongs to all of us.
Alongside acknowledgements that its perspective is personal, the book is intentional about being inclusive, as with its shifts between the terms “patient,” “survivor,” and “thriver,” with notes that those living with cancer identify in different ways.
The book focuses on positivity and empowerment, even through its acknowledgments of the realities of a terminal cancer diagnosis: “As crappy as it is to have cancer, the experience of surviving and thriving with this disease has allowed me to explore … the best parts of who I really am.” Scientific research is eschewed in favor of personal experience, with notes from Kalver’s husband, a fertility specialist, and a creative coach used to add nuance. WeGotThis.org is often mentioned, though, in an advertorial, nonorganic, sometimes distracting manner.
More useful is the book’s specific advice. In “Sentiments That Make Me Cringe,” for example, discomfort-inducing words of “support” are recorded alongside advice for reframing such conversations. And in “Facing My Own Fears,” there are notes about potential discomfort with needles, MRIs, and CT scans, plus tips for managing the related anxiety. Most effective is the book’s reigning tone of unapologetic belief in the ability of cancer thrivers to live full lives postdiagnosis.
A vulnerable, personable, and empowering memoir–cum–self-help guide, We Got This is about taking control of one’s life and thriving after a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Reviewed by
Allison Janicki
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
