I know, I know. It doesn’t seem possible that “sexy” and “cancer” could ever be in the same sentence.

But talk to Kris Carr for a few minutes, and you’ll understand. She’s a 36-year-old actress who, four years ago, thought she had the world’s worse hangover after partying like a rock star. Turned out she had inoperable cancer, a cancer so rare they don’t even have a treatment for it. There’s no ribbons, no walks, no rubber bracelet to wear.  

A lot of people–most likely I’m one of them–would have  would have just heard their diagnosis and gone and gotten under their beds and sucked their thumbs and cried, but Kris, who says she’s always been full of sass, decided instead that it was time to give cancer a makeover. As she put it, since there was no cure and no treatment, she might as well figure out her own answers. To hear her tell it, she pulled a Dumpster up to her life, and started renovating: learned how to meditate, eat nutritional meals, take care of herself; then she reached out to other young women with cancer, and best of all, decided to learn how she wanted to live the rest of her life. (It didn’t involve lying in her bed and thinking about tumors, believe me.)

It all sounds like one big cliche–and believe me, I have a very overdeveloped cliche-detector, and sometimes things that are supposed to be “inspirational” and “heartwarming” make me want to run in the opposite direction. But Kris’s accounting of her kick-ass four years dealing with cancer doesn’t shy away from the tough parts. She just doesn’t have time to stay wallowing in self-pity. Anybody who reacted to the news she has Stage IV incurable cancer by taking her camera along with her to doctor’s appointments gets my vote every time!

The name of the book–and oh, yeah, there’s a documentary too–is “Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips,” and it comes from the fact that when Kris would send mass emails out to all the other “cancer babes,” that’s what she would type in the subject line. And whenever she mentioned cancer, she would always capitalize the “C.” Finally one of the other women said they should stop giving cancer the benefit of a capital “C”: that was giving this disease waaaay too much power. In fact, they decided, they should even misspell the word. Spell it CANSER or something. I love that! That you can hurt cancer’s feelings by not even bothering to spell its name correctly.

Anyway, click here to go buy her book, even if you don’t have cancer…it’s that good, and by all means, click here to go visit her website and blog. (There’s even a little movie there you can watch.)

Honestly, she makes life sound like so much fun that you’ll be glad you’re alive.