Katherine Malmo is the author of Who in This Room: The Realities of Cancer, Fish and Demolition (Calyx Books, October 11, 2011), a collection of creative nonfiction about cancer--but also about joy found in lemon trees, fly fishing, welding and demolition. Her work has won awards from the Bellevue Literary Review and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. Katherine currently lives a cancer-free existence with her husband and two adopted children in Seattle. She occasionally writes about adoption, race, health and living a low-toxin life at Hysterical Mommy.
On your nightstand now:
Your Three Year Old: Friend or Enemy by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg. If they replaced "or" with "and," it would make this the truest title ever written. Pretty soon I'll have to move on to Your Four Year Old: Wild and Wonderful. These books are like therapy, assuring me that our daughter, who spends an exorbitant amount of time digging holes for monsters under the deck and filling them with under-ripe plums, is totally. completely. normal. Also, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee and Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Wonderful Electric Elephant by Frances T. Montgomery. This book was published in 1903 and in my great-grandmother's book collection. It's about a man named Henry who builds a mechanical elephant and walks across the planet, under oceans and over mountain ranges. There are stairs that drop down from the elephant's belly and inside is a living area and navigation station full of knobs and switches so Henry can make it move. There's a peephole so he can see out and I think he can pick things up with the trunk and bring them inside to examine. The book is the story of his travels, and it is captivating. However, it was written in a different time and, I found out much later, that it is quite racist and sexist. My mom read it aloud to us before bedtime and skipped over areas with offensive content. Someone should write a contemporary version. Writers, take note.
Your top five authors:
Pam Houston, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Abraham Verghese, David Sedaris.
Book you've faked reading:
I can't say I faked reading it, but I can say that I pretended that I liked it. The Notebook, The Proof and the Third Lie by Agota Kristof. What is the truth? Who cares.
Book you're an evangelist for:
This is the most difficult question for me to answer. I'm always talking about books. This is kind of me: Portlandia: Did You Read? I want to devour books. Anyway, it's hard to choose just one. I frequently push Barrel Fever by David Sedaris. It's his first and funniest. I'm always recommending Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. Beautiful book. In an act of real-life foreshadowing, I read it just before my diagnosis. I also love Sweethearts by Melanie Rae Thon.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Collector, Jack Nisbet. A solitary pinecone. Lovely.
Book that changed your life:
I'm going to go pretty literal on this one. Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book by Dr. Susan Love--700 pages of everything you could possibly need to know about breast health and breast cancer. It helped me understand my Inflammatory Breast Cancer diagnosis and laid the foundation for my treatment and care. It also terrified and terrorized me with its survival rates and statistics.
Favorite line from a book:
"And here we aren't so quickly: I'm not twenty-six and you're not sixty. I'm not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into any sea." Jonathan Safran Foer's Here We Aren't, So Quickly in the New Yorker, June 14 & 21, 2010.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Heaven on earth, that book.