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Molly
Molly Ivins (born August 30, 1944, as Mary Tyler Ivins) is an American political commentator, journalist, and author based in Austin, Texas. She is a syndicated columnist with nationwide distribution; her column appears in nearly 400 newspapers across the United States.
Her articles have appeared in 'Esquire', 'The Atlantic Monthly', 'The Nation', 'Harper's', 'The Progressive', 'The Progressive Populist', and 'Mother Jones'. She has been a commentator for 'NPR', 'The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer', and '60 Minutes'.
In 1999, Ivins was diagnosed with stage III inflammatory breast cancer. Joking about it, she said:
'One of the things I said was that I had been in great hopes I would become a better person as a result of confronting my own mortality, but it actually never happened. I didn't become a better person.'
After two mastectomies, Ivins is now a speaker on surviving breast cancer.
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Who Needs Breasts, Anyway?
by Molly Ivins
Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.
One of the first things you notice is that people treat you differently when they know you have it. The hushed tone in which they inquire, "How are you?" is unnerving. If I had answered honestly during 90% of the nine months I spent in treatment, I would have said, "If it weren't for being constipated, I'd be fine." In fact, even chemotherapy is not nearly as hard as it once was, although it still made all my hair fall out.
My late friend Jocelyn Gray found the ultimate proof that there is no justice:
"Not just my hair, but my eyebrows, my eyelashes—every hair on my body has fallen out, except for these goddam little mustaches at the corner of my mouth I have always hated."
Another thing you get as a cancer patient is a lot of football-coach patter. "You can beat this; you can win; you're strong; you're tough; get psyched." I suspect that cancer doesn't give a rat's ass whether you have a positive mental attitude. It just sits in there multiplying away, whether you are admirably stoic or weeping and wailing. The only reason to have a positive mental attitude is that it makes life better. It doesn't cure cancer.
My friend Judy Curtis demanded totally uncritical support from everyone around her. "I smoked and drank through the whole thing," she says. "And I hated the lady from the American Cancer Society." My role model.
The late Alice Trillin wrote some brilliant essays on being a cancer patient, and I found her theory of "the good student" especially helpful. When you are not doing well at cancer—barfing and getting bad blood tests and generally not sailing through the whole thing with grace and panache—you have a tendency to think, Help, I'm flunking cancer, as though it were your fault. Your doctor also tends to look at you as though he is disappointed. Especially if you start to die on him.
You don't get through this without friends. Use them. Call them, especially other women who have been through it. People like to help. They like to be able to do something for you. Let them. You will also get sick of talking about cancer. One way to hold down the solicitous calls is to give your friends a regular update by e-mail, if you have it.
If you work, I recommend that you keep right on doing so (unless you hate your job). Most companies are quite good about giving you time off when you need it, and working keeps you from sitting around and worrying.
Losing a part of a breast or all of one or both has, obviously, serious psychological consequences. Your self-image, your sense of yourself as a woman, your sense of your sexual attractiveness are going to be rocked whether or not you have enough sense to realize that tits aren't that important.
I am one of those people who are out of touch with their emotions. I tend to treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives—a long-distance call once or twice or year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay.
My friend Mercedes Pena made me get in touch with my emotions just before I had a breast cut off. Just as I suspected, they were awful. "How do you Latinas do this—all the time in touch with your emotions?" I asked her. "That's why we take siestas," she replied.
As a final indignity, I have just flunked breast reconstruction. Bad enough that I went through all that pain for the sake of vanity, but then I got a massive infection and had to have both implants taken out.
I'm embarrassed about it, although my chief cancer mentor, Marlyn Schwartz (who went to the Palm for lunch after every chemo session), has forbidden this particular emotion. So now I'm just a happy, flat-chested woman.
Reference: http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020218/ivins.html
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Molly
Molly was born in Monterey, California, and grew up in Houston in a staunchly Republican family. Her father was a corporate lawyer; her mother was a homemaker who held a B.A. in psychology from Smith College. She attended prep school in Houston where she and future president George W. Bush had mutual friends.
Molly made her way to liberalism on issues of civil rights ('once you realize they're lying to you about race, everything else follows') and the Vietnam War. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and later attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she recived her M.A. Ivins also studied for a year at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris, France.
Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the 'Houston Chronicle', followed by the position of sewer editor. She went on to the 'Minneapolis Tribune', where she was the first woman police reporter in that city and, later, the reporter who covered a beat called Movements for Social Change, where she notes that she wrote about 'militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers.'
1970 brought Molly back to her home state of Texas as co-editor of the 'Texas Observer', a muck-raking monthly, where she specialized in covering the Texas Legislature. In 1976, Molly joined the 'New York Times', first as a political reporter in New York City and Albany. She was then named their Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief. She says there was no one else in the bureau.
Molly, who is known for her colloquial, humorous style, has described her idea of hell as 'being edited by the Times Copy Desk for all eternity,' and she was eventually fired for referring to a chicken-killing as a 'gang pluck.'
In 1982, she returned to Texas as a columnist for the late 'Dallas Times-Herald'. After the newspaper closed, she spent the next nine years with the 'Fort Worth Star-Telegram'. She became an independent journalist in 2001 and also in that year won the William Allen White Award from the University of Kansas.
Her other awards include the Smith Medal from Smith College, the Pringle Prize for Washington Journalism from Columbia University, and was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the 2003 recipient of the Ivan Allen, Jr. Prize for Progress and Service. She is part of the journalism network of Amnesty International and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
She has stated that her two greatest honors are that the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.
She is noted for her generally liberal views. She has stated her admiration for William Cowper Brann, a late 19th-century Texas journalist, several times.
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Bibliography
* 'Who Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known' - (Random House, 2004) ISBN 1400062853
* 'Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America' - with Lou Dubose (Random House, 2003) ISBN 0375507523
* 'Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron' - by Robert Bryce, foreword by Molly Ivins (PublicAffairs, 2002) ISBN 158648138X
* 'Sugar's Life in the Hood: The Story of a Former Welfare Mother' - by Sugar Turner and Tracy Bachrach Ehlers, foreword by Molly Ivins (University of Texas Press, 2002) ISBN 0292721021
* 'The Betrayal of America : How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President' - with Vincent Bugliosi (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001) ISBN 156025355X
* 'Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush' - with Lou Dubose (Random House, 2000) ISBN 0375503994
* 'You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years' - (Random House, 1998) ISBN 0679404465
* 'Nothin' But Good Times Ahead' - (Random House, 1995) ISBN 0517164299
* 'Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?' - (Random House, 1991) ISBN 0679404457
* 'The Edge of the West and Other Texas Stories' - with Bryan Wooley (Texas Western Pr, 1987) ISBN 0874042143
* Newspaper Columns - http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Ivins
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Molly's Recurrence
January 27, 2006
Recurring breast cancer won't dry the pen of this quick-witted writer;
Molly Ivins was given the news about her health in November;
she has forbidden get-well gifts
by W. Gardner Selby
Chief Political Writer
Austin American-Statesman
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Molly Ivins, battling breast cancer afresh, sounds as feisty as ever.
The South Austin resident continues writing her left-of-center column,
raising money for the journal where she forged her tart take on
politics and, of course, cheerfully gigging Republicans such as the
well-coifed governor of Texas.
Ivins, 61, tongue-in-cheeked that Gov. Rick Perry's trip to Iraq this
week will slow anti-American insurgents. "The mere sight of his hair
will do a world of good," she said.
She chatted with two visitors to her home office in Travis Heights
without donning her wig of reddish-blond locks; her pate was nearly
bald.
The California native, who grew up in the tony River Oaks section of
Houston, fielded her latest (and third) cancer diagnosis around
Thanksgiving. Surely she could be excused for feeling sorry for herself
or slowing down.
"Actually," she said, "I feel pretty good." Renewed chemotherapy
appears to be helping.
Ivins has all but forbidden gifts of food and other items. She was
overwhelmed with well-intended advice and goodies after she wrote of
her initial diagnosis of breast cancer in 1999. The outpouring kept her
from telling readers of the recurrences in 2003 and two months ago, her
assistant, Betsy Moon, said.
Lately, Ivins has urged friends and fans to give instead to The Texas
Observer, a liberal biweekly of politics and literature run on a
shoestring for 51 years. Ivins, co-editor with Kaye Northcott from 1970
to 1976, even let the magazine put her face on a $10 gourmet chocolate
bar available online and at the magazine's ramshackle Austin office.
At a recent Observer fundraiser, Ivins spoke without her wig. She
pleaded guilty to "shameless exploitation of sympathy for cancer. We
might as well do something useful because God knows I don't need
another casserole."
Ever a quipster (once trading opinionated barbs weekly on CBS-TV's "60
Minutes"), Ivins remains a spring of saucy invective on behalf of the
oft-defeated left wing of American politics. She persists, too, in
provoking conservatives who sometimes dismiss her as an ill-informed
critic who still (goldang it) writes well.
Little has deterred the former cub reporter for the Houston Chronicle.
A graduate of Smith College and the Columbia University Graduate School
of Journalism, she also reported for the Minneapolis Tribune, the
Observer and The New York Times before becoming a columnist starting in
the early 1980s at the (now-defunct) Dallas Times Herald.
Nearly 400 newspapers, including the Austin American-Statesman
subscribe to her twice-weekly column. Ivins isn't giving in.
"Maybe this is false bravado," she said. "In some ways for me, this is
like having a manageable disease. It's like diabetes. It doesn't mean
it's not going to come get me in the end."
Ivins, never married, said she's divided charitable bequests in her
will between the American Civil Liberties Union, which she credits with
defending the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, and her cherished
Observer.
In her career, she said, she's watched daily newspapers excel and
expand thanks to head-to-head competition and then, after many folded,
leash spending on hard-to-get stories and shrink, becoming less vital.
But she has hope for the Internet as a venue for investigative
reporting.
Publications like the Observer are pivotal, she said. "Unless we keep
these little independents alive, we're going to lose the whole thing,
the whole idea of public-interest journalism."
Reference:
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/01/27ivins.html
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Molly
My mother has survived cancer eight times including a bout
with breast cancer. Fortunately she is in good health once
again and going strong.
We wish all the best for Molly Ivins.
cammie bruner
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Molly
Molly,
I hope you have tried some nutritional options to help yourself. An example is maitake mushrooms, which can help boost killer T-cells, and DMG, a substance that occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables and can help people undergoing chemo to feel better.
All the best!
Bonnie Duncan
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Molly's January 27, 2007 Update
Molly Ivins' cancer 'back with a vengeance'
by Lisa Sandberg
Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
Nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins has been hospitalized in her recurring battle with breast cancer.
"I think she's tough as a metal boot," her brother, Andy Ivins, said Friday after a visit with her at Seton Medical Center in Austin.
Andy Ivins said his sister was admitted to Seton on Thursday. She spent Friday morning with longtime colleagues and friends, and was "sleeping peacefully" when he arrived later in the day.
A self-described leftist agitator, Ivins, 62, completed a round of radiation treatment in August, but the cancer "came back with a vengeance," and has spread through her body, Andy Ivins said.
Ivins' columns, which she infuses with passion and wit, appear in more than 300 newspapers around the country. She's written six books, four of which were best sellers.
They included Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, which she wrote with longtime friend Lou Dubose; and Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known.
Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. A year later, she described her treatment with characteristic wit: "First they poison you; then they mutilate you; then they burn you. I've had more fun."
She received her third diagnosis a year ago; despite her illness, she's managed to crank out her columns.
In a piece earlier this month, she wrote that she was starting a newspaper crusade to end the war in Iraq.
"Raise hell," she urged readers. "Think of something ridiculous to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. ... We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!' "
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4503517.html
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Molly
Miss Ivins, I've been a fan of yours for as long as I can
remember. Your column is one reason I never canceled my
newspaper subscription during its very republican years.
Chris Martin
Odessa, Texas
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Molly
Molly Ivins
As a student at UT Austin from 1971-1973 you inspired many of us to get involed in Politics. Through the years you have kept us going. We will continue. But first we'll have a wake and celebrate your life.
All you saints of heaven, get ready to welcome the grandest woman who has left earth right Gall Darn It when we want her here to see the end of Scrub and his lies.
Molly never knew my name.
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Molly
Molly, I was drawn to your site since a dear friend Joanie
has just been diagnosed with IBC, and she is 55 like you
were.
It has given me great hope reading your story, and I have
found your humor much like hers. I am drawn to read some of
your written work and look forward to understanding more
about you as a person.
I wish you such peace and comfort as your struggle continues.
Loving thoughts,
Marilyn
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