There are enough cancer memoirs to fill a small bookshop, with bookcases for all the affected body parts. It can feel churlish to apply critical faculties to this of all subjects, but if there is a high bar for the genre, then it’s one Mark Steel clears like Dick Fosbury on a good day.
Sporting metaphors are a feature of The Leopard in My House, a new entry in the “throat” section by the comedian, broadcaster and campaigner. While waiting for a radiotherapy appointment in the basement of a London hospital, Steel meets Jules, an army general. As the treatment weakens them, they resolve to take the stairs rather than lift back up to ground level. “We’d describe the previous day’s climb as ‘set off at a good pace but only the first stage of the Tour de France. By the third week it was ‘two sets and a break down with a heavily bandaged ankle, but determined to finish the match’.”
Connections like this, between people who have little in common beyond a love of sport and rotten luck, give Steel’s book much of its warmth. Likewise tales of the nurses who tolerate the same “I’d be a terrible junkie” joke while they struggle to raise a vein in his arm, and the French teacher who doesn’t spare him during the weekly lessons he takes while still able to speak: “La biopsie … la biopsie est feminine.”
Steel also recounts the flood of good wishes he received after revealing his diagnosis in October 2023, four months after he noticed a swelling in his neck while shaving. (That was when he began to feel like he was living with a dangerous wild animal – the leopard of the title. “I’d contacted the leopard authorities and they assured me they were used to dealing with leopards like this, and they had a plan for removing the leopard, though it would take a while, and two or three times a day I could still hear it growl.”) In a taxi to a radiotherapy appointment, he is confounded to get a call out of the blue from the veteran comic Jimmy Tarbuck, whose politics Steel had always despised. “I listened to this man in his 80s who I had once considered a demon acting out of sincere generosity and kindness.” There is a sense throughout of a man knocked off course, and being forced to ask big questions about who he is and what really matters. The ride we accompany him on is inspiring and invariably very funny.
A recurring character is fellow comedian Shaparak Khorsandi, whom he knows as Shappi. At times the book feels like it’s addressed to her – part public declaration of love, part attempt to repair what has evidently been a rocky romance. More straightforward is Steel’s relationship with his son, who is a great source of support and pride.
In later pages Steel presents a kind of tragicomic treatise on the importance of publicly funded healthcare. Not that he glosses over NHS failings, which for him include a lost biopsy and an app-generated urgent appointment that opens a spiral of paranoia but turns out not to exist. Nor does he spare us the indignities of his surgery or treatment. Among other things, it temporarily robs him of his speech and taste buds. A ravaged epiglottis means that for three months he can’t eat, relying instead on a creamy formula, mainlined into his stomach, that ought to put anyone off Huel. Then there are the strange mucal side effects. Let’s just say that mucus is as central here as gunge was to Noel’s House Party.
Steel’s book will comfort any reader directly affected by serious illness. It’s illuminating, too, for those who have watched a loved one get sick and struggled to know what to do or say (avoid “But you look well!”). Steel himself reflects on the deaths of his close friends and colleagues Linda Smith and Jeremy Hardy with new understanding.
For everyone else, well, as Steel himself might put it, this account is a bit like being invited into the mind of that bandaged tennis player, as he somehow takes the match into a deciding set, with the Centre Court crowd fully behind him.
• The Leopard in My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland by Mark Steel is published by Ebury (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
