I thought she was terminally ill with cancer.
She does or did have cancer. I had not heard that she was terminal.
She's been battling cancer for a long time now.
ROME (AP) - Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist known for ruthlessly grilling her subjects, says she detests interviews but has granted one herself - to herself - because she is dying of cancer.
The Milan daily Corriere della Sera published the slim volume, "Oriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci," as a supplement to its newspaper Friday.
In the work, Fallaci, 74, asks herself why she agreed to the interview.
"Because death is on my back. Medicine has issued the sentence: 'Lady, you cannot get better. You won't get better,'" is the reply.
Fallaci's battle with cancer began some 11 years ago.
She writes that she stopped taking care of herself, including having medical tests and seeing oncologists, on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks against the United States. [She was living in her apartment in NYC at that time.]
Fallaci said she needed to spend all her time writing and translating two books that have since been published and which, in her typically blunt style, reflect scathingly on society, including the differences between Christian and Islamic culture.
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1186500/posts
If you haven't ever read Rage and Pride, go here:
http://www.borg.com/%7Epaperina/fallaci/fallaci_1.html
"I was at home, my home in the center of Manhattan, and at nine o'clock on the dot, I had a sensation of a danger that perhaps would not touch me, but certainly concerned me. The sensation that one feels in war, as a matter of fact in combat, when with every pores of your skin you feel the incoming bullet or rocket, and your ears perk up and you scream to those next to you: "Down! Get down!". I pushed the sensation aside. I was not in Vietnam, I was not in one of the innumerable fucking wars that since WWII have violated my life! I was in New York, by gosh, on a marvelous September morning, in the year 2001. However, the sensation continued to assail me, inexplicably, and I did something I never do in the morning, I turned on my TV. The audio was not working. The video yes. On every channel, and I have almost 100 channels, it was the same scene, you saw a tower in the World Trade Center that was burning like a gigantic match. A short circuit? A lost small plane? Or else a premeditated act of terrorism? Almost paralyzed, I stared and while I stared, I posed those questions, while on the screen appeared a plane. White and big, an airliner. It was flying very low. Flying low it was going towards the second tower like a bomber aiming at it's objective, and throwing himself on it. I understood. I understood also because in that instant, the audio returned and transmitted a chorus of savage screams. Repeated, savage, "God! Oh, God! Oh, God, God, God, GOD!" And the plane buried itself in the second tower like a knife entering a butter cake."