To be clear: the screenwriter and novelist Seth Greenland (The Angry Buddhist) would have preferred not to have received a lymphoma diagnosis in 1993. But this is a guy who lives for artistic validation. In A Kingdom of Tender Colors: A Memoir of Comedy, Survival, and Love, he sheepishly admits that the worst thing about his cancer diagnosis was his fear that "I would not get to live out the creative dreams I believed that I had been put on this planet to fulfill." Hence, file this memoir--an absorbing and funny work that would not have existed if Greenland hadn't had cancer--under "silver lining."
Greenland's lymphoma has lousy timing: the diagnosis comes when he's 37 and his wife is pregnant with their second child; his mother died of cancer 18 months earlier. The average survival rate for someone with Greenland's diagnosis? Six years. A natural-born optimist, Greenland takes a just-say-yes approach to his treatment options. Eight rounds of chemo? Greenland is in, even if it means "needles, nausea, constipation, and other deflating side effects that would have brought a twinkle to the Marquis de Sade's eye." And why not chase the chemo with an alternative regimen "that requires me to ingest exponentially more tablets and capsules than Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took on their bus tour of North America"? Meditation, prayer, macrobiotic food, tai chi, analysis--Greenland tries and evaluates it all ("Shark cartilage? At least it's not therapy"). The scene involving Greenland's maiden voyage with his doctor-prescribed coffee enema is a comic set piece.
While the cancer stuff is the book's calling card, Greenland gauges correctly that if he's sufficiently entertaining, readers won't begrudge him a few detours. He's in no apparent hurry to get through sections about his Scarsdale childhood, his famous ad man dad, and his struggle to balance professional satisfaction with financial solvency (he cops to having written for TV shows that he would never watch). In his epilogue, Greenland says that he wrote A Kingdom of Tender Colors to "put my experience in some kind of perspective, give form to it and allow me to see if it might somehow be useful to anyone else." By "experience" he means, of course, cancer, but he may as well be referring to his productive, bustling and well-lived life. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Readers may come for the screenwriter/novelist's cancer story, but they'll stay for his gifts as a raconteur.