Helen Lapada’s FIGHT LIKE HEL is an intensely personal memoir-cum-self-help book, but, in truth, it is of more value as the former than the latter. Subtitled “Fourteen Battle-Tested Principles for Resilience,” the author chronicles her battle with a cancer diagnosis at the beginning of the 2020s.

Lapada’s work and relationship tribulations were thrown into sharp relief by her diagnosis, which, coming as it did during the COVID lockdown, put her in the unenviable position of going through the innumerable appointments and tests on her own. In truth, the self-help takeaways are less instructive than the memoir elements, which describe, in sometimes painful detail, the business of dealing with a life-threatening illness.

A strength of Lapada’s memoir is her willingness to acknowledge that what worked for her may not work for other people. As she is a Catholic by upbringing, much of Lapada’s book is suffused with her faith and how it helped her through the darkest moments of her illness. However, she recognizes that readers may pray to a different deity, or even have no faith at all. She is disarmingly honest about the whole business: “Faith, in any form, is hope wearing different clothes” proves one of the most startling descriptions of that quality this reviewer has read in a long time.

Nor is that the only occasion on which Lapada airs her feelings in granular detail. She is candid about her loving but strict upbringing and the social environment she found herself in, which culminated, for various reasons, in a certain unwillingness to share her true feelings—as well as a learned imperative to seek approval. “It was like being in a toxic relationship with myself,” Lapada notes at one point. Her style is jaunty and sardonic (news about the side-effects of chemotherapy leads Lapada to embark on a mental “hair funeral”), while her description of her status as a “professional people pleaser” raised a smile: “If there’d been an Olympic sport for saying yes when I meant no, I’d have been a gold medalist with millions in endorsements.”

Simply put, WORK LIKE HEL is a deeply personal, heartfelt, and even charming read about a terrible experience. The self-help sections, which are shoehorned into each chapter at the end (open-ended questions with spaces for the reader to write in their responses), seem almost like afterthoughts. In its savviness and candor, Lapada’s memoir stands perfectly well on its own merits.

Helen Lapada’s FIGHT LIKE HEL: Fourteen Battle-Tested Principles for Resilience is a witty, engaging, and warm-hearted take on the ins and outs of cancer diagnosis and treatment.

~ Craig Jones for IndieReader