My Life Without Me is a 2003 Spanish-Canadian romantic drama film written and directed by Isabel Coixet, based loosely on Nanci Kinkaid's 1997 short story collection Pretending the Bed Is a Raft. It stars Sarah Polley, Mark Ruffalo, Amanda Plummer, Scott Speedman, Leonor Watling, Deborah Harry, Maria de Medeiros, Jessica Amlee, Kenya Jo Kennedy, Julian Richings, and Alfred Molina.
The film follows the story of Ann (Polley), a working-class young woman in rural British Columbia. Having first gotten pregnant as a teenager, now 23 years old and married, she lives with her unemployed husband and their two young daughters in a trailer parked in her mother's backyard while working as a janitor at a local university. After fainting from severe abdominal pain one morning, she gets tested and discovers she has terminal ovarian cancer. With only a few weeks left to live, Ann proposes to find a new mother for her daughters, to have a relationship with another man just to see what it's like, and to record posthumous cassette tapes for her daughters' birthdays for every year until they turn 18.
This film contains examples of the following tropes:
- Black Comedy: Ann asks an adult blonde nurse with glasses if she knows what it's like to be standing outside at school alone, waiting to be picked up by her parents (Ann fears being late to pick up her daughters from school). A brief cut shows a little blonde kindergartener with glasses, standing in the frost alone outside a school building with frozen snot on her nose, after which Ann's nurse says, "yeah, I do" and rushes Ann's appointment in.
- Last Day to Live: Basically the main premise of the film; Ann has terminal ovarian cancer and will die in a month or two.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Ann sleeps with another man repeatedly, despite having a loving and devoted husband already, but she's portrayed as sympathetic because she was a teenage mother and is now dying at a young age.
- You Are Fat: Ann's friend Laurie, a stocky woman who constantly fears being fat, eats 8 spare-ribs at a dinner she's invited to. Ann's daughter Patsy gleefully remarks, "you're a pig!" to the woman, who is then later seen eating nothing but carrot sticks.
