Nic Russell: Loss, breast cancer, a heart transplant and Parkinson's

Nic Russell's memoir Bollix took four years to write, partly because she had to learn to write it at the same time. She got her medical notes to use as a timeline, and found that revisiting the clinical language pulled the emotion back too. By the time she was in her late 40s, Nic had lost a daughter to Ewing's sarcoma, survived breast cancer, received a heart transplant and been diagnosed with Parkinson's. She set up a charity in her daughter Kenzie's name after discovering that family support evaporated the moment a child died. She joins Culture 101 to talk about the book, the friends she describes as an orchestra, and the difficulty of writing about her own life without the benefit of showing, not telling.