Manjusha Pawagi, a successful family court judge, has written a not-so-typical memoir about her experience with cancer. Wryly funny and stubbornly hopeful, this is her quirky take on what it’s like to face your own mortality when, to be honest, you thought you’d live forever. She describes how even the darkest moments of life can be made worse with roommates; details how much determination it takes to ignore the statistics; and answers the age-old question: what does it take to get a banana popsicle around here?

Manjusha Pawagi has a law degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Stanford University. She has worked as a reporter for CBC Radio in Charlottetown, PEI, and the Associated Press in St. Louis, Mo.; and as a lawyer for the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and the Office of the Children’s Lawyer. She was appointed to the Ontario Court of Justice in 2009 and she is currently a family and youth court judge in Toronto.

Manjusha Pawagi's profile page

• Long-listed, Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour

For a writer to elicit tears and exuberant laughter in the same book is an accomplishment. Such is the triumph of Manjusha Pawagi's Love and Laughter in the Time of Chemotherapy.

Atlantic Books Today

... candid and often funny... Pawagi's inexhaustable sense of humour does not neutralize so much as complicate her terror and despair... Love and Laughter in the Time of Chemotherapy is full of such revelations, which emerge from among minute details as is often the case with memoirs, but their frequency and richness here is due largely to the author's honesty.

Quill & Quire

Pawagi shares a painfully honest and surprisingly funny account of her cancer treatments and the search for a stem cell donor who could save her life.... Pawagi expertly walks the tightrope between humor and heartbreak. Readers will celebrate her return to health and take heart from it.

Publishers Weekly