Scenes from cancer’s theatre of the absurd

Review: Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting by Meredith Norton and My Diary by Mio MatsumotoTwo books provide wry insights into what it is like to live with breast cancer, says Geraldine Bedell, and why humour often seems the only rational response

The survival specialist

After a difficult upbringing, Martha Beck went on to have a child with Down's syndrome, marry a gay man and realise that she, too, was gay. As she tells Emine Saner, who better to write self-help books?

‘I was never about boo hoo hoo’

Dave Pelzer, who single-handedly launched the 'misery lit' genre with his horrific memoir of childhood abuse, is now publishing his fourth self-help book. In it, he insists that happiness is all about 'moving on'. So why does he continue to obsessively trawl through his own past? Decca Aitkenhead meets him

Love’s alchemy

Rebecca Abrams delights in the psychologist Charles Fernyhough's tender account of his daughter's first three years, The Baby in the Mirror

I’m only doing this to save my marriage

Thanks to a new self-help book, When Good People Have Affairs, we now know that there might be all sorts of reasonable excuses for adultery. Zoe Williams has even come up with a few more of her own ...

Could you make 28 meals from this?

A new book claims it can save you time and money and reduce your eco impact - with its seasonal shopping and cooking plans. Zoe Williams gives it a go

Right all along

On reading Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson's Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), David Newnham warns on the dangers of relying on one's memory

Nasty to be nice

Elizabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores, a critique of the UN's policy on Aids, suggests a pragmatic alternative. By Michael Fitzpatrick