Book Review: I Want to Grow Up...

Title: I Want to Grow Hair I Want to Grow Up I Want to Go to Boise

Author: Erma Bombeck

Date: 1989

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: 0-06-06170-1

Length: 174 pages

Illustrations: color inserts of children’s artwork

Quote: “At the moment they stop being a kid and turn into a child with cancer, the smiles disappear.”

At Wit’s End, Just Wait, I Lost Everything, The Grass Is Always Greener, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, and Aunt Erma’s Cope Book were hilarious. Motherhood and Family were, just slightly, predictable,and after Family Erma Bombeck reached that dreaded point in a comic writer’s career when the writer is asked to write a whole book that’s earnest and sweet. Dave Barry wisely turned down that offer. Bombeck was persuaded that children with cancer wanted a funny book about their shared experience. This is that book.

It’s funny in spots, but...Laughing out loud, life with cats has taught me, is what we humans do instead of purring; it usually expresses a pleasant feeling and, if that pleasant feeling happens to coincide with unpleasant feelings about something else, the acts of laughing or purring work internal muscles and activate biological mechanisms that make us feel better. People recovering from cancer, and their families, need to laugh out loud, long and often. Funny books, records, and movies help. A humorist has a high spiritual calling in this world.

However, the experiences that prompt laughter in real life don’t always work in books. When you are the patient or the family member caring for the patient, then, in the moment, you can laugh out loud about cancer itself. You scrub the patient’s favorite coverlet in the tub, dry it, get it smelling fresh at last, and within half an hour it’s nasty again. Either you or the patient says “Lather. Rinse. Repeat,” and this becomes the funniest joke ever to use this line, funnier than all other jokes that used this line together, and you roll about and paw the air. But this kind of moment is not meant to be shared. Someone else laughing about your illness or your caretaking is not funny. Someone else’s laughing about their illness or their caretaking is a gross-out.

So this was the one of Bombeck’s books that people bought to complete their collections, or encourage a favorite author who already knew she wasn’t going to have a very long life either, or support the cancer research funds in aid of which the book was sold. I’d pick any of Bombeck’s other books over this one for personal pain control.

In this book we meet children. The last thirty pages of this book are a roll call of cancer patients and their siblings who laughed at cancer in ways Bombeck worked into this book. They are painfully adorable children. They wrote in from several countries where Bombeck had a following, including France as well as New Zealand. Some of them did grow hair and grow up. Some of them went to Heaven, and some even went to Boise. Some of them may still be alive today.

They stick their artificial legs out of doors or under tent flaps to make people think a whole person is watching or listening.

They turn their prosthetic feet backward.

They pour fruit juice into specimen cups, then freak out nurses by saying “I think I’ll run it back through” before anyone runs actual lab tests on these “samples” of sick comedy.

They build snowmen with carrots stuck in their back sides for transfusions.

They race wheelchairs.

They joke about their hair falling out, telling inquisitive people “I joined the Marines,” or claiming that then-popular TV tough guy “Kojak is my father.”

They hug their doctors tight, saying “I hope I never see you again.”

One of them, in full remission and growing fast, shows Bombeck around the campus of the university hospital where she went for chemotherapy. Another one affectionately nicknames one of the best university hospitals in the world “Motel Hell.”

Nearly all the ones we meet had survived, and several had gone into remission, during the time the book was written.

They’re still very, very sick, and their parents and doctors are still very, very sad .(Mothers, Bombeck reports, did most of the caretaking and fretting in 1989. Fathers were “rare birds”; in 1989 a lot of younger men had become those “Sensitive New Age Guys” who cried real tears about being turned down for dates or being late for meals, but fathers still felt a need to reframe grief as anger, growling about how “if some guy was harassing your daughter you could rip his throat out, but you can’t do anything about cancer.”)

And research, of course, helps people with cancer live longer. Donations may be made...pick your cancer research fund; you undoubtedly have one.

Bombeck’s focus on the kids who joke about cancer makes this book less unpleasant to read than I may have made it sound but, if you want to shriek and cackle and make your children want to share a full-sized book with you, pick any or all of this writer’s other books.