The Cancer Celebrities

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I was 16, living for a year with my family in Ireland, and I was viciously homesick. I was an American teenager, and I wanted Coca-Cola with cracked ice, Lip Smackers, Sticky Fingers jeans. Ireland in the 1970s was still under the provisional rule of the Irish Taliban—even condoms were illegal, not that I needed any—and there was one television channel. It broadcast only in the evenings, beginning with a call to prayer and ending with a reckless bit of ecumenism: For 15 minutes, a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister debated some issue of the day (guess who won?). Then there would be “The Soldier’s Song,” a picture of the Tricolour rippling in sunlight, and finally—nothing.

Then one day the international edition of magazine arrived. The photograph on the cover didn’t have anything to do with inflation or China. It