kathleen watt

REARRANGED is a beautifully written, honest, and profoundly insightful memoir of an opera singer’s experience with facial cancer. I appreciated it both from a professional perspective, as a researcher specialising in the impact of cancer on body image,  and on a personal level. Watt’s narrative offers a compelling understanding of how cancer transforms a person’s sense of self and daily life, as well as the experiences of those around them. Her clear, accessible explanations of the medical and reconstructive procedures provided invaluable insight. I gained a great deal from this book and would highly recommend it to anyone working in this field, as well as to readers seeking a deeper understanding of people’s lived experiences of cancer.

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Dr. Helena Lewis-Smith, PhD, CPsychol | Associate Professor of Psychology, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK​​

☙☙☙​

REARRANGED is authentic and revealing. Ms Watt is perceptive, intelligent, and playful. She remains positive and optimistic throughout. She has stories of remarkable unprofessionalism, but also of tingling patient-centredness. The book should be required reading for all trainees in specialties dealing with cancer. There is also much in here for any reflective healthcare professional.

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Peter G. Robinson, BDS, MSc, PhD | Emeritus Professor, University of Bristol School of Oral and Dental Sciences; Past Deputy Dean, School of Clinical Dentistry, University of Sheffield, England

☙☙☙

I have previously read short personal articles written by sufferers of mouth cancer and been deeply moved… However, this book takes things to a higher level, and is outstanding in the depth and breadth of information presented. The text is well written, and the author cleverly mixes the harsh reality of the medical details with the huge human emotional impact of cancer on not only herself but also her loved ones… There are many professional things to be learnt from reading this book and as such it is of direct interest to anyone involved with the care of patients with head and neck cancer, either in secondary or primary care… [especially] for dental hygienists or dental therapists working in multidisciplinary teams…

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book… an interesting blend of medical facts with the important emotional aspects of cancer. Kathleen Watt deserves our gratitude and congratulations in putting forward a unique and extraordinarily detailed account of the way in which cancer transposed her life. 

Michael A. O. Lewis | Emeritus Professor (Oral Medicine) Cardiff University; Past president, British Society for Oral Medicine, British Society for Oral & Dental Research; Co-author of best-selling textbooks A Handbook of Oral Medicine and BDJ Clinical Guide Oral Medicine in Primary Dental Care.

☙☙☙

This memoir is written twenty-five years after the long-drawn out catastrophe she lived–the trauma, the misunderstandings and betrayals, the revisions and losses. There are many lyrical passages of reflection, balanced by strange encounters and realisations. A smart, witty and intelligent voice prevails, confronting the reader at times with her honest, raw accounts of her worst moments. The reader will be challenged by the precise, technical accounts of medical and surgical procedures, but it is all part of Kathleen’s lived experience, when, though she did not control the process, she was an informed and an active agent in her reshaping and resurrection...This book is both a healing memoir and a call to all whose lives are assaulted by illness, and their carers and loved ones, to remember the person at the centre of all the procedures and to honour their spirit and their choices. The story has greater impact because the surgery and healing process ultimately succeeds, and she has a second chance to live life fully...  Read the complete review at Memory and You

Christina Houen, MA, PhD | Author of the memoir trilogy, This Place You Know, A Practice of Loss, and A Gradual Grace: The Final Memoir (Ginninderra Press, 2023.) 

☙☙☙

Kathleen Watt’s resilience and writing style echoes that of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Short, anecdotal chapters that are vivid and visceral bring the reader into Watt’s sometimes chaotic, sometimes cruel, sometimes comical but always candid experiences as a post-surgery cancer patient. She reflects that “effective caregivers must somewhat inhabit the patient” (p. 150). So, too, must effective readers of medical memoir inhabit the author, and Watt’s writing generously invites us to do just that... Read the complete review at Hektoen International

Amanda Caleb, PhD, MPH |  Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine; Founding director, Medical and Health Humanities, Misericordia University; Author of Global Health Inequities: Differing Experiences (Cambridge University Press, 2025.)

☙☙☙​

There is nothing more compelling, in my view, than a well-told medical story from the patient's viewpoint, and [​Kathleen Watt’s] narrative nonfiction memoir of a New York opera singer’s battle to survive craniofacial osteogenic sarcoma kept me turning the pages well past midnight. Coming as it did mid-career, this formidable and debilitating form of bone cancer was a far tougher foe than the cancers most of us will ever encounter, either personally or in our friends and family members. And Watt’s account of her struggle, conveyed with grace and good humor, is gripping—as both a personal story of survival, and as a testament to the medical team that addressed each frightening stage of her medical battle. Watt’s writing is wonderful—easy to read, compelling, and just when I'm wondering if she's going to cover something, she does.

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Pat McKnees | Editor, DYING: A Book of Comfort (1996, GuildAmerica Books) 

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☙☙☙

REARRANGED is Kathleen Watt’s riveting and important pathography about her decade-long odyssey of treatment for, and recovery from, osteogenic sarcoma of the jaw... Watt is a gifted story-teller who tells her story with humor and insight ... [and] many lessons for physicians, patients, and caregivers. We learn about Watt’s personal relationships and how they were impacted by years of surgery... We learn how important it is for patients to have functioning support systems... As physicians we need open-ended narratives such as REARRANGED to supplement our narrow professional education. Over three decades of studying illness-narratives [I've found] common themes fall into one of, or a combination of, three narratives: Quest, Chaos or Restitution. Watt’s narrative encompasses all three. I felt privileged to have taken a master class in patient care from Kathleen Watt.    Read Dr. Elpern's full review HERE

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David Elpern, MD | Dermatologist, Williamstown, MA; Founder of the Online Journal of Community and Person-Centered Healthcare

☙☙☙

Kathleen Watt’s REARRANGED: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed is a masterfully written book by a very talented woman. I have read more than my share of medical memoirs. This book is slightly different. ... Kathleen’s self-consciousness, her worry about how she would be perceived, her uncertainty about next steps, all are similar to the feelings of those born with a facial difference. For the facially different are all reckoning with the juxtaposition of how we look in the mirror and who we are inside—who we identify as—and the painful dissonance this creates. Further, Kathleen’s face, neck, and head were part of her career instrument—something she carefully goes over for readers, even providing diagrams for clarity. She describes the support of her family and partner—so admirable, and so important to finding a path forward, beyond diagnosis and treatment. For behind every medical miracle is a family system, sitting beside the patient in appointments and surgical waiting rooms. REARRANGED is a tour-de-force of medical memoir; Kathleen lays out her story in articulate and humorous ways, all the while asking readers to confront existential questions. A wonderful read of overcoming some scary, nearly insurmountable odds. 

 

Kara Jackman, MLIS | Communications Specialist II, LeaRRn & CoHSTAR; Health Law, Policy & Mgmt, Boston University School of Public Health

☙☙☙​

The medical journey Kathleen Watt endured is harrowing, yet REARRANGED leaves the reader full of hope. It is a testament to remarkable human resilience, beautifully written.

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Rosalind Kaplan, MD | Author of The Patient in the White Coat: My Odyssey from Health to Illness and Back; and the memoir Still Healing: A Doctor’s Notes on the Magic and Misery of Life in Medicine (Minerva Rising Press, 2024.)

☙☙☙

Kathleen’s voice in REARRANGED resonated for me in several ways: her New York vernacular, her humor, her generation, her geography and of course her medical tale. As someone who has an unquenchable thirst for medical narratives, this read educated and engaged me for its duration. Kathleen is an inspiration for resilience. Her insights into the world of medicine, doctors and patients, communication, human relations and herself give readers a broad stroke and minute details of a complex medical encounter. Rearranged joins the canon of medical narratives.

 

Nancy Gross | MA, MMH, Overlook Medical Center, Summit, NJ

☙☙☙

REARRANGED An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed, by Kathleen Watt, has a great cover illustration, and lists subgenres of narrative and autoethnography. In reviewing the book, I thought of Jo Spence’s photographic record of and reflections on her process with breast cancer and heard Colm Tóibín [speaking of] his experience... Spending several weeks immersed in REARRANGED changed my own response to disfigurement: I no longer look away after a momentary glance. It could be that the very vulnerability Watt conveys is her most important message.

 

Richenda Power | Member, Medical Journalists’ Association, U.K.

☙☙☙

In REARRANGED, Kathleen Watt exposes raw courage in her journey through the Big C. Telling her story in the first person, yet with a third person detachment that allows the reader deeply inside her tortuous diagnosis, interventions, and recovery, Kathleen tells her story with aplomb. While in the depths of her pre-reconstructive surgery period, I was especially struck by her ability to understand how her appearance influenced others, and allowed her to begin accepting her “pirate” appearance. Written from the place of loss, where her opera career was receding into the background, Kathleen’s journey is one of hope. I was captivated by the intensity of a world I know well, though as a medical insider. I was ill-prepared for the intimacy of her journey. Bravo, Kathleen, for sharing your story. 

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Walt Fritz, PT | Pain Relief Center, Lima, NY; Author of Manual Therapy for Voice and Swallowing - A Person-Centered Approach

☙☙☙

Told in sumptuous detail and a never-gone-for-long sense of humor as well as gravity, Kathleen Watt’s REARRANGED is an amazing story of resilience that unfolds at just the right speed. I was magnetized from the first word to the last.

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​Nathaniel Rosenthalis | Actor, singer, poet; Instructor, NYU

☙☙☙

REARRANGED is our collective human story of inexplicably transforming into who you never thought you'd be, ultimately becoming who you're meant to be. Kathleen's story is a beautiful agony with a golden thread of love sewn throughout. The suffering that transports you there tells you more about who you are and who your people are, more than joy ever could.

 

Ann Graham​ | Executive Director, MIB Agents; Osteosarcoma Survivor

☙☙☙

In REARRANGED, writer and former opera singer Kathleen Watt takes us on her extraordinary facial cancer journey—through diagnosis and disfiguring surgery, through loves and lovers gained and lost, with lemonade made from countless lemons. A narrative rife with racy wit, self-deprecating humor, and an eloquence of language befitting grand opera, REARRANGED invites us to bear witness to her battle and ultimate triumph over “the Big C”. Her curative surgery came at the cost of her singing voice, and like any athlete suffering a career-ending injury, she was left with the question, “What do I do now?” A self-admitted imperfect person trapped in a perfect disaster, Kathleen Watt leads us to Hell and back, emerging smiling on the other side.

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Matthew D. Garrett, MD, MM | Radiation Oncologist, Former operatic tenor, Juilliard-trained

☙☙☙

REARRANGED is a must read. From the moment I began reading REARRANGED, Kathleen Watt’s survival instincts captivated me. The reader will celebrate every small success as Kathleen battles through seemingly insurmountable odds and relentless obstacles. The book is a testimony to the courage of the human spirit. As an international speaker dedicated to discovery of head and neck cancers, I applaud Kathleen’s efforts in bringing awareness to this insidious cancer. Beautifully written and will resonate deeply with anyone who has ever been touched by cancer.

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Jo-Anne Jones | International Speaker; CE Leader, Dentistry Today

☙☙☙

When opera singer Kathleen Watt discovers a small bump on the roof of her mouth, her life, career, and face shatter into pieces only she can puzzle together again. Cancer; the Big C. Faced with impossible choices, surgeries and surrender, a chance meeting on the subway reveals the gut-wrenching picture of how blessedly normal her life might have been. Humorous and sometimes hallucinated, this singer’s written voice will ring out in the halls of your heart.

 

Marcia Whitehead | Professional Singer; Vocal Coach; Author of the memoir Botox Me

☙☙☙

Kathleen Watt’s narrative memoir reveals her indomitable humanity, indefatigable spirit, and remarkable endurance while receiving and subsequently surviving intensive and radical cancer treatment. She experienced the unimaginable as a professional operatic singer and truly-alive adult—a rare, deeply embedded facial tumor, that would require intensive, life-altering surgery and relentless follow-up care. She authentically and descriptively details what “went well,” and the related feelings of triumph and accomplishment, but also the complications, setbacks, agony and challenging interactions that negatively (and at times, destructively) impacted her experience and permanently changed her life’s path. She has written with transparency, bravery, honesty, and fairness. The rhythm, cadence and artistry of her words embodies her forever-musicianship, and she has deployed her gifted voice in a tour-de-force written performance. Patients, health care professionals and every-day folk alike will benefit greatly from her lessons imparted and her wisdom shared.

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Douglas Brandoff, MD, FAAHPM | Attending Physician, Palliative Care Clinic, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Alumnus, Juilliard Pre-College Division (Cello)

☙☙☙

For such brutal subject matter, Kathleen has subverted the well-worn tropes of the medical memoir, instead writing a story that trills with candour and authenticity. The writing in and of itself is lyrically evocative, affecting and profoundly moving, while the story is one of true grit, and a flawless example of what it means to be a survivor. At its core, REARRANGED is a story of hope and is a worthy and much needed addition to the canon of medical memoir. REARRANGED is set to become a seminal memoir on not just what it is to have cancer and survive, but what it means to be human.

 

Carly-Jay Metcalfe | Author of the memoir Breath, from University of Queensland Press

☙☙☙

In REARRANGED, Kathleen Watt meticulously documents her rare bone cancer diagnosis and the painful treatment and facial disfigurement that followed. As a professional opera singer, Watt began treatment with a greater appreciation of the hard palate than most; it was, after all, one of her many instruments. But it’s Watt’s time as a patient that pushes her to a new and intimate relationship with her anatomy—including its limitations, its interdependencies, and its capacity for recovery.

Watt’s memoir joins a magnificent roster of books that explore our complex relationships with our faces: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy; The Face: A Time Code by Ruth Ozeki; and Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, all come to mind. But where Grealy, a fellow facial cancer survivor, is moody and metaphysical, Watt offers us a gracious, probing, and often hilarious autobiography of the palate—sampling from her irrepressible passion for art and opera, her keen observations about the medical system’s humor and horror, and the abiding love of her friends and family. 

Few of us will ever experience a trial quite like Watt’s. But by raising the red velvet curtain on her cancer, Watt offers readers an all-too-rare opportunity to reflect on their own embodiment.

 

Eleanor Cummins | Science Journalist

☙☙☙

In a sentence too beautiful to be repeated in a mere blurb, Kathleen Watt wonders about the limits of being human. Her story of survival of thirty-plus surgeries that ended her career in opera, including a patient's-eye view of high-tech surgery and of care received from lover, family, and friends, answers her own question. Watt retrieves her voice from the ruins to sing a song she could not have sung before losing it. Brava!

 

Michael Rowe, MD, PhD | Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry; Director, Citizens Community Collaborative, Yale Department of Psychiatry

☙☙☙

Unfolding against a deftly drawn backdrop of 1990s New York City, Kathleen Watt’s gripping memoir, is much more than an account of her long, winding struggle with and eventual steep victory over a deadly disease...  Watt’s unforgettable memoir is eloquently written, keenly observed, and intellectually imposing. Yet it reads with the swift pace, dramatic clarity, and enthralling suspense of a page-turner novel. By turns, it may make you think deeply, laugh out loud, tear up, or even flinch. But you can’t look away.

 

Cori Ellison | Dramaturg; Vocal Arts Faculty, The Juilliard School 

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☙☙☙

Kathleen’s account of her experience with Osteogenic Sarcoma is a very intimate portrayal. It’s articulate. And it’s factually accurate. It’s all in there. Anyone going through something like this will absolutely benefit from reading this beautifully written book.

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Peter D. Costantino, MD, FACS | Brain and Spine Surgery of New York (BSSNY)

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☙☙☙

Kathleen Watt’s courage, energy, curiosity, and sheer engagement with life have carried her through challenges that would be unimaginable—except that her clear, lively prose and precise, fearless medical descriptions make it impossible NOT to imagine her experiences.  Candid, unsentimental, and vivid, REARRANGED is an inspiring book on multiple levels.

 

Rachel Hadas | Professor of Classics, Rutgers University; Award-winning author of more than twenty books of poetry, essays, and translations

☙☙☙

A rare facial bone cancer derails Kathleen Watt’s life as an opera singer, but with an indomitable spirit, Watt fights back, enduring thirty surgeries and countless rounds of chemotherapy. Watt uncovers a deep well of compassion and support from her family and friends, propelling her forward along her treacherous journey. Enlightened by her experiences, Watt discovers beauty in her life, despite “whatever storms may howl.”

   

Faith Fuller Wilcox | Award-winning author of Hope Is a Bright Star: A Mother’s Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning to Live Again 

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☙☙☙

In her new book, REARRANGED, music writer and former classical singer Kathleen Watt writes of how her diagnosis of face cancer changed her life forever. Watt tells the unforgettable, often catastrophic story of a life rearranged by more than thirty surgeries over the course of ten years. With the odds repeatedly stacked against her, she affirms that warriors and heroes still walk amongst us.

Glenn Alpert | Life coach; Career tenor (retired) The Metropolitan Opera 

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☙☙☙

Clear-eyed curiosity and indefatigable resolve propel Watt's memoir, a chilling tale of an opera singer who finds herself the target of osteogenic sarcoma in her mid-face. The surgical removal of the tumor from the bones where sound resonates is followed by years of reconstruction. Courage, loyalty, medical expertise and determination seal the cracks of a well-examined life. The result is a story told with grace, honesty, and the humor necessary to survive becoming, as expressed by the world’s first essayist, Michel de Montaigne, one of “those that we call monsters.”

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Don Cummings | Author of Bent But Not Broken

☙☙☙

In Kathleen Watt’s world of protracted illness and recovery, body-wrenching chemotherapy is character-building, and humor is life-saving medicine. As an opera singer who once used her voice for resonant expression, Kathleen maintains this talent through her written words and her inspiring story of resilience and survival. REARRANGED is about what illness changes; and even more so, about what remains.

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Sara Arnell | Author of There Will Be Lobster - Memoir of a Midlife Crisis

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☙☙☙

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