SALT LAKE CITY, December 19, 2019
How many people start college at 14, get cancer at 16 and survive? Of those, how many go on to obtain multiple degrees in medicine? Eryn Stansfield is one person who can answer yes. In her memoir, recently picked up by E.L. Marker™, Stansfield uses her experiences of isolation as a child with autism spectrum disorder and her fear as a teenager facing the death sentence of cancer to examine the redeeming qualities of pain and the value of human connectedness.
Growing up, the only family Stansfield knew was her mother; making friends was of no interest to her. While girls her age were having sleepovers, Stansfield was buried in a book. When she wasn’t reading, she was cleaning and organizing her bedroom. For hours. Even school didn’t interest her. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a fourth grade teacher who publicly praised high-performing students, Stansfield’s life might have taken a very different turn. But Stansfield was hungry for that praise and decided school work was very important to her. In fact, she focused on nothing else, becoming, in her words, “adept at ignoring others.” She sat on the front row of every class in college, even if it meant walking past hundreds of pairs of eyes, so she could feel as if she were the only person in the room.
Cancer changed all of that.
Stansfield firmly believes that being diagnosed with cancer at age 16 and struggling through the subsequent chemotherapy was life’s way of waking her up to an appreciation of the beauty in the world around her. She saw the face of death, and the experience transformed her. It helped her reconcile her head with her heart, reason with faith, the ordered with the organic. A perfectionist, she began to see the “elegance of chaos”. An inveterate loner, she learned the value of human connection and of life lived beyond books. “Cancer,” she says, “whittled down my sharp edges.”
This is a book about the many transformative experiences a person goes through to learn the value of pain, compassion, and self. It speaks to the outlier, the nerd, the square peg in a round hole. In short, it speaks to all of us. Stansfield’s story may be unique, but her memoir is for everyone.
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Eryn Stansfield attended the University of Utah at age 14. After graduating with a degree in medicine, she went on to study nuclear medicine at Harvard Medical School. In addition to her work as an occupational medicine physician, she is a competitive bodybuilder.
As a new writer, Stansfield sought after a publisher that would help her tell her story. “WiDo Publishing made me feel supported from the very first email,” she says. “I was immediately impressed with the feedback they provided on my manuscript.”