Some people's fantasies are other people's realities.

"You're cured now, " Susan Cummings's surgeon proclaimed to her a few weeks after her mastectomy. "That's it?" "That's it," her surgeon repeated. But, that wasn't it by a long shot for Cummings, as we learn in her memoir about her first six years after treatment for early-stage breast cancer. A single woman "progressing at lightning speed through her middle years" when diagnosed, a struggling New York actress, she takes us on her up, down and sideways adventures-sometimes poignant, often laugh-out-loud funny-as she wrangles with her fear of more cancer and shame of her altered body. But with indefatigable determination-from scouring the North American continent for the perfect health regimen to conducting a "beautiful breast survey" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art-she does reclaim her moxie