Author(s): Margaret Edson

Anthologies, Essays, Literary Studies

A striking and sharply funny reflection on the frailty of existence and the complex relationship between knowledge and love. Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned specialist in the brilliantly difficult Holy Sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. Her approach to her illness is not unlike her approach to Donne: aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness ' and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy programme ' she comes to reassess her life and her work with profundity and an unbearably moving wry humour.