PW: Why did you choose the title The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming?

JN: I was diagnosed with breast cancer in October, and I had a mastectomy on December 15, so it was the pre-Christmas holiday blitz. It actually happened that the Victoria's Secret catalogue really did keep coming to my house. During that time, I was trying to decide what to do in terms of reconstruction. So I would sit at my kitchen table with my friends and look at pictures of my options, and inevitably somebody would pick up the catalogue from the mail pile and say, "What about these?" At this point, the title feels to me like a statement about life—that life keeps on coming at you and you can't hide from it.

PW: Your book reads like a memoir, but it's organized into lessons. Why did you decide to structure it this way?

JN: I really didn't feel like telling a medical journey story. I think that there are a lot of those out there. Instead, I started thinking in terms of lessons learned, and I found that the book took that shape very naturally. I wanted there to be a universality to the book, and the lesson structure allowed me to do that. My hope was to write something that would be useful.

PW: Your other book, Altared States, is also about a personal experience. Did your first book make this one easier to write, despite its more serious subject matter?

JN: Absolutely. I had the great advantage of knowing that my family wasn't going to freak out. Also, I now have a whole method of writing about life material that has come to serve me well. In the first draft, I write exactly what I think, and then I go back and try to take out the parts that I think will be hurtful. I don't think that removing those parts affects the integrity of a nonfiction story.

PW: Your story is not artificially upbeat the way some breast cancer books are, but it is still very hopeful. How did you strike this realistic balance?

JN: Part of the reason that I was able to capture that tone was that I wrote the book when I was still quite sick. Some people advised me against it, saying, "You might want to give yourself a little breathing room." But I felt compelled to get it down. I didn't want the messages to be all hashed out and smoothed over. I wanted them to be very raw.

PW: How did you go about getting the book published?

JN: I have an agent here in Los Angeles. She had been working with me on a novel for about a year and a half. When I came up with this idea, I was embarrassed to show it to her. I thought she was going to say, "Oh, no, she's one of those writers who can't finish anything." But her reaction was incredibly positive. I showed her three essays and an outline. She said we needed a fourth essay to show publishers, and I ended up writing the whole book.

PW: What do you hope women with cancer will take away from this book?

JN: I hope they look at my story and say, "Here's a woman who went through this and became a lot wiser." I like to say breast cancer made me a wise, old woman at 36. You don't often get the chance to step back and say, "What did this all mean to me?" I find that people react to this book because they sense that having breast cancer does mean something. Until we have a cure, we have to use our stories to heal ourselves if we can.