In May 2001, WTA tour player Corina Morariu was a married 23-year-old enjoying a successful career as a professional tennis player. Then she was diagnosed with an advanced form of leukemia. As she writes in her new memoir, Living Through the Racket: How I Survived Leukemia . . . and Rediscovered My Self, beating cancer turned out to be relatively easy. Recovering from the emotional impact was the hard part. Now 32 and divorced, Morariu splits her time between her native South Florida and her home in Los Angeles. She spoke to TENNIS.com about surviving cancer, reliving the ordeal through her book, and working as a commentator for the Tennis Channel.
TENNIS.com: Lately there have been a lot of memoirs from tennis players. Why did you want to tell your life story?
Corina Morariu: My hope in writing the book, and the reason that I did write it, is that it would help people, as cliché as that might sound. I know what helped me when I was going through the tough times in my life, and that’s what I wanted to do with this book. If two people being treated at Jackson Memorial Hospital [in Miami], where I was treated, read the book and get something from it, or they can draw some hope from it, that would make it worth it for me.
Your collaborator on the book was Allen Rucker. Describe the process of working with him.
We met for six weeks a couple times a week at my home in L.A. He interviewed me, or I would just talk and tell him my story. I wanted to focus more on the six years of my life that were the toughest, so once we decided that’s how I wanted to do it, he helped me structure it. I had written some stuff before so that was included. I modified things or put things in my own words.
It was very much a collaborative effort. It’s a crazy experience to document your life, you know? It’s such a personal thing and I cared so much about this book that it was difficult to find someone that I really connected with. I met Allen, and he’s an inspiration. He’s paralyzed from the waist down and he’s written his own book and collaborated on a number of others. I just felt like he totally understood the message I wanted to get across in the book.
And what is the message?
It’s a book about dealing with adversity in life. When I was going through all the things that I was going through, my illness being the major thing, and then all the other personal struggles, it always helped me to read books or talk to people where they’re like, I’ve been through something like that and I came out on the other side and there’s hope. You can be a better, stronger person because of this. I drew a lot of inspiration from other people who have gone through challenges. So that was the message that I wanted to get across in the book—there’s always hope on the other side.
Emotionally speaking, what did you get out of this project?
I knew it was going to be tough, and once I was in the process of writing it, it was so emotional. I felt almost like I was under hypnosis. I was reliving every single minute. You have to put yourself back in these situations to be able to articulate what you were feeling, and so that’s what I did throughout this process. Those were the toughest six years of my life. To go back and kind of relive them was almost traumatic for me. I knew the message that I wanted to get out at the end, but in order to get to the end I had to go back to the beginning as far as my illness. Once [the book] was kind of done, I felt like I could really put everything behind me even more so than when I started writing the book.
You reveal a lot in the book: your conflicted feelings about being a pro tennis player; your relationships with your ex-husband and coach, Andrew Turcinovich, and ex-boyfriend, former ATP player Justin Gimelstob; the untold side effects of chemotherapy; and more. Was it hard not to hold back?
I felt if I was going to write the book and really have people gain something from reading my story, I needed to be honest about what happened and how I got to where I am now, which is in a good place. I think especially for cancer survivors, the disease itself is brutal and very difficult to deal with. That’s one thing that’s understood. Chemo’s hard and cancer’s terrible, everyone gets that. But for a lot of cancer survivors, it’s the fallout afterwards. Your life is so completely turned upside down by this disease. You’re not the same person you were. It changes you. It shatters your life.
My career was so closely associated with my body, so to have that taken from me, it was an identity crisis in a big way. I’m a cancer survivor now, but I’m in a marriage that’s not really for me. Try to figure that one out. Now I’m trying to play again and I’m jumping into another relationship. I was running from one thing to another. Again, some people didn’t go through cancer, but they’ve been through a divorce. That was all part of my life and I just wanted to be as honest as I could, but be sensitive to the people who were involved in my life. To write about my innermost feelings, what I went through in therapy, it was hard. There’s some anxiety associated with it, especially with the book coming out and having people know your innermost thoughts and your intimate struggles.
You were also tough on your family, especially about how they reacted to your wanting a divorce from Andrew, whom you started dating when you were 15 and he was 26. What’s been their reaction to the book?
They’ve been very supportive. I think that’s part of what the book is about, relationships and the struggles that people go through and the healing. Again, everyone goes through turbulent relationships or turbulent times with people who they are close to. Forgiveness and understanding, that’s the place I’ve come to with many of the people in my life, which is a nice place to be.
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Morariu stays in touch with tennis these days as a commentator for the Tennis Channel.Did you have to forgive in order to write the book?**
Yes, absolutely. Forgiveness and understanding is what we all need. I’ve clearly made mistakes in my life and done things that I would like to take back—that’s another message in the book: that we all go through that. When I had gotten through my illness, people were telling me I should write a book. I just didn’t feel like I was in a place where I could write honestly about my experience. I haven’t even made sense of the whole thing, so to write about my illness, I wouldn’t even know what the message would be. I was still trying to figure it out myself. I was still in the throes of it. I got to a place where I was like, “Okay, I’m on good terms with all the people in my life and, more importantly, I’m on good terms with myself and all the mistakes that I’ve made and all the things I’ve experienced.” It just seemed like the right time and that was a big part of the process as well.
What’s been the harder battle, fighting cancer or getting to know who you are?
Getting to know who I am, and coming to terms with my life and the things that have happened to me. Cancer was the wake-up call, the catalyst to the rest. I almost feel like before I got sick I was just living with blinders on. My dad wanted me to play tennis; I played tennis. I got involved in a relationship when I was a teenager and got married. My life didn’t really change and I was plugging along playing tennis and doing what I thought I should do. I had a life that had so many privileges, so that made it easy to kind of just keep along that path. Then all of a sudden I get sick and that’s all taken from me. The blinders are off and all of a sudden I’m like blinded. I don’t know how to make sense of all these things. You know, a big part of your innocence is taken from you when you go through something like that. Coming to terms with all of it, the fallout and how I lived my life before cancer, how I wanted to live my life after—I mean, you can’t discount how difficult the process of fighting cancer was, but it was the emotional impact that was the most difficult to deal with.
Changing subjects, you’ve been working as a commentator for Tennis Channel since retiring from the tour in 2007. What do you like best about the job?
I like being courtside and reporting what I see going on the court. I love doing the interviews. I didn’t stop playing that long ago so I still know a lot of the players. It’s just kind of a fun part of the job that I really enjoy.
Because you still know some of the players, is it hard not to take a side or to feel for a player during frustrating moments of a match?
I’ve been able to detach myself pretty well. You can get emotionally invested in a good match. Not necessarily invested in one side winning or losing, but just in the excitement of watching a really good match, and sometimes in the sadness for whoever comes out on the losing end of it. I had to do a couple of Lindsay [Davenport]’s matches where that was a little more challenging. But most of my closest friends on the tour have retired. That makes my job a little bit easier as far as being objective.
Besides commentating and this new book, do you have any other projects in the works?
No. The book was taking up most of my free time last year. Hopefully, the time I have when I’m not calling matches is going to go toward promoting the book and trying to get the word out there. Those two things are keeping me busy enough, and then I can still enjoy my life, which was one of my goals after stopping tennis.
Do you still play?
I hit occasionally. I do some charity events and some camps. Not consistently. I’ll hit for fun, but rarely. I really like working out and yoga, so usually if I have time during the day, I prefer to do that than hit some balls.
Corina Morariu’s Living Through the Racket: How I Survived Leukemia . . . and Rediscovered My Self (Hay House, Inc) goes on sale on Feb. 15. You can purchase it here.