Diary of a Detour

"Diary of a Detour is such a great book, excessive like Lesley Stern's own intense appetite for life that includes her wide knowledge about the intricacies of disease. It's the most pleasurable cancer book imaginable. I was riveted, the specificity of the writing is a drug. Stern has written a wonderful, stirring, magnificent book. Oh, World, you are the love object of this hardworking, self-deprecating extravagant genius." - Eileen Myles, author of (Evolution) "Diary of a Detour is wonderful on so many levels. Besides being an extraordinary writer, Lesley Stern is emotionally and intellectually sophisticated in such subtle and deep ways. She outlines the stakes of learning to live and feel in the grip of inescapable finitude and mortality, together with others of many kinds and species, but also alone, as irreducibly this vulnerable person and no other. I love this book." - Donna J. Haraway, author of (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) "What emerges most powerfully is Stern's determination to live-not just to stay alive but, as Tennyson writes in 'Ulysses,' 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' . . . A mixture of the mundane and the medical, the ordinary and the extraordinary." (Kirkus Reviews) "[Stern's] final book, the magnificent Diary of a Detour (2020) that appeared just before her passing, records how the force of obsession - obsessions with planting and tending, with chickens, with the growing and preparing of food, with the cycles of nature - literally prolonged her life, pulling her through into new and brilliant investigations, and an ever-widening collaboration with activists at all levels of the environmental movement." - Adrian Martin (ArtsHub)