January 2023 Newsletter

Gigi Pandian is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning mystery author, breast cancer survivor, and accidental almost-vegan.

The child of cultural anthropologists from New Mexico and the southern tip of India, she spent her childhood being dragged around the world on their research trips and now lives outside San Francisco. She writes the Secret Staircase mysteries, Accidental Alchemist mysteries, and Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries. She’s been awarded Agatha, Anthony, Lefty, and Derringer awards, and is a co-founder of Crime Writers of Color.

When were you diagnosed with breast cancer and how old were you then?

It was 2012, I was 36-years-old when, during a routine annual gynecologic visit I was found to have a small breast lump. “It’s probably nothing, but I’ll send you for a biopsy,” my doctor said.

It turned out to be stage 2 breast cancer.

What was your initial reaction to this news?

Complete shock, it was so unexpected, especially at such a young age. I have no family history of breast cancer and tests showed me to be BRCA negative.

What did your therapy include?

My life was turned upside down.

I was rushed into the process of surgery, a lumpectomy, and radiation, and also a year of chemotherapy. I had to be on Herceptin for the rest of the year and also Tamoxifen for the long term.

What were the most life-changing aspects of this therapy?

It was heartening to see I had so much support. My husband, my family, and my friends all rallied around me. My husband suggested I make a list of people who will be there for me, people I could call upon if I needed someone, people who wouldn’t mind if I threw up in their car. And it was amazing to see how long the list was.

Prior to starting chemo I went for chemotherapy class where they try to educate patients on what to expect. One of the questions in the class was do you have someone who would give you a hug, and it was so sad for me to think there could be people who don’t have someone to hug them.

Chemo wasn’t great but it wasn’t as bad as it seems in the movies. It knocks you out for a few days but then you do recover, in time to have the next dose.

I worked part time soon after my surgery partly because I didn’t want to be at home feeling sorry for myself.

One of the biggest positives out of my year of chemo when I found myself isolated, was quite a bit at home with lots of time on my hands. I threw myself into writing a book that became The Accidental Alchemist. I also self-published the first novel I’d written and that my agent had come close to selling, but publishers told us they weren’t sure how to market it. At the end of the year, I had a double celebration—being a published author as well as completing my first year of chemo. The isolation was also good training for the pandemic.

I don’t want to play down the difficulty of those times. I had huge curly hair, which was really thick. And I lost all of it. In fact, I initially cut it really short in preparation of losing it because it’s suggested that the loss of hair through chemo is less traumatic if you’ve already cut your hair.

It returned eventually, not as thick though. On the plus side I had a bit of fun around it because my writer friends bought me a gorgeous mystery writer wig, it was black with a streak of red in it.