The Terminal Test

I’ve worked in film for more than twenty years. I also survived ovarian cancer.

I started writing about cancer during treatment—which was, in hindsight, a nuts idea, but also a brilliant distraction. It produced some truly insane writing, including bird funerals set to Prince music. It also landed me on the Black List, which was pretty great considering it only took two surgeries and six rounds of chemo to get there.

Cancer changed the way I watched film and television. Suddenly, terrible portrayals of people with cancer were everywhere: the dead mother in a headscarf, the bloody cough followed by six months to live, the whole Bucket List industrial complex.

Hollywood was obsessed with me. But not with me living.

I had survived cancer, but every screen seemed determined to tell me I was supposed to die from it. It made survival feel like a plot hole. And I knew I couldn’t be the only person feeling this way.

So I started collecting the evidence. The Terminal Test makes the pattern visible—and hopefully encourages us to make stories that let people with cancer be complicated, ridiculous, unfinished and alive.

We’re people. Not emotional support cancer patients.