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 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."
While cancer is the book's calling card, Greenland gauges correctly that if he's sufficiently entertaining, readers won't begrudge him a few detours through childhood and writing for TV shows that he would never watch. In his epilogue, Greenland says that he wrote this memoir to "put my experience in some kind of perspective." 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