Welcome to Good Marrow

Coming in 2024: A newsletter to commiserate about cancer and the many hopeful, strange, and difficult tomorrows afterwards

I’ve had enough of cancer but it never seems to have had enough of me.

I am a three-time leukemia remission wanderer (ALL) who has spent the last ten years bouncing between cancer and not.

There they go… First transplant. Cord blood. Thanks babies.

This newsletter is an attempt to make sense of its long shadow and the light and dark that I have found myself navigating. Because after the chemo is done, and bells have been rung and hair has returned— scars linger.

Beginning in January 2024, this is a newsletter for patients, caregivers, family, friends, and anyone trying to make sense of their brush with cancer. Or I don’t know, maybe the mortal stakes of cancer have a strange allure to you— I get it, go ahead and read along.

Every Tuesday I will explore the intersections of cancer and illness with whatever is on my mind that week, along with a few recommendations of what I watched/read/listened to. Typically I like to thread my cancer experience along an ambling recollection of the people, places, and thoughts that have brought me here.

Here is Los Angeles, but my story begins in the suburbs of Chicago. Forever a cinephile at heart, between cancer bouts I have made some kind of living as a working class screenwriter— so expect some of that. Otherwise, it will be a literary-leaning, string-theory approach to the intersections of cancer and film, music, food, NBA basketball, friends, family, being proudly half-Chinese, and whatever throughline ties it all together that week.

I’ll eventually get to my story, which I think is pretty good. I mean, how many bone marrow transplant patients eventually marry their nurse? Luckily, this one.

Hope to chat in the comments. And if you know someone who might be interested— pass it along with this cute, lonely button below. To a better tomorrow.