Milkshakes and Morphine

Milkshakes and Morphine

A Memoir of Love and Life

Summary

Honest, heartrending and full of humour, this is an extraordinary memoir about an unconventional childhood and the absurdities of the cancer experience. It is also, most importantly, a celebration of life.

When Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her throat, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock. I can’t have cancer, she thinks. I’ve done my hair. But there is another reason she can’t countenance cancer. She was orphaned by it at the age of nine.

Fox’s story weaves together past and present as she recalls her rackety, unconventional childhood, while also facing the spectre of being lost to her young boys. Yet she confronts her treatment with the same sassy survival instinct that characterised her childhood misadventures. She takes life’s precariousness and turns it on its head.

‘Life-enhancing… Original and wonderful’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Exquisite and tender’
SARAH PERRY

Reviews

  • Generous, engaging and laugh-out-loud funny, Fox's memoir is a reminder that the willingness to share experience, good, bad, and sometimes bloody terrifying, is one of the best parts of what makes us human
    Julie Myerson

About the author

Genevieve Fox

Formerly the Features Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Genevieve Fox has edited on a range of publications including the Independent, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, ES magazine, YOU, Arts Review, Grazia and Glamour. She writes about culture, property and luxury travel, as well as general features. Milkshakes and Morphine is her first book.
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