The Robots Drove Home

At the age of six, waking from surgery in an operating room at the Mayo Clinic, Jordan Anderson saw his own three cancerous lymph nodes suspended in fluid, in a jar on the table next to his head. This was his first step on a journey through nitrogen mustard chemotherapy, an overly-effective compound based on the mustard gas used in trench warfare during World War I. Jordan was treated in 1989. The drug is no longer used in any cancer treatments today, due to its excessive toxicity. After a harrowing brush with death and ultimate recovery from cancer, Jordan struggled privately for many years with the guilt and shame of his survival, which ultimately manifested as anorexia. This survivor's guilt stood in stark contrast to the Fundamentalist Evangelicalism of his family. The Robots Drove Home is Jordan's dark, comedic, and ultimately hopeful account as a twenty-three-year-old man attempting to ruthlessly inventory his experiences, confront his demons (whether real or self-imposed), and wrestle with the impossible question of what childhood cancer says about God. Is it a miracle to survive? An answer to prayer? Or is childhood cancer simply a horror that disproves God's benevolence, or even existence?This Book is set in the bitter cold of January, 2007, in Minnesota, four years after a flawed suicide attempt. Jordan is recently graduated from college, unemployed, and leaning heavily on alcohol to support him as he digs through his recently-acquired medical files, interviews his family, and constructs a narrative informed by research and memory that is accessible but inconsistent. Seeking catharsis, Jordan learns through the process that his memories of childhood shed more light on who he is as a person, than on what actually happened. Jordan's writing style in The Robots Drove Home is most heavily influenced by Annie Dillard, Kurt Vonnegut, Christopher Moore, and David James Duncan, as well as the King James Version of the Bible (large portions of which he memorized as a child), the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens, and the theological musings John Piper and Greg Boyd.