When I learned I had cancer, my first inclination—after I called my mother and collapsed against my girlfriend—was to write. My disease was, I would explain on my blog, a small thing, a malignant nodule on my thyroid so tiny I was surprised my endocrinologist had detected it at all. And yet, minuscule as it was, the mere knowledge that it was there shattered me.
In her new book Reading and Writing Cancer, Susan Gubar discusses her own experience of illness in similar terms, observing that “cancer and its treatments … often imperil or fracture the self.” Though she is best known for her academic work on women’s literature—especially the monumental The Madwoman in the Attic, which she published with Sandra Gilbert—she has spent much of the past decade writing about life with ovarian cancer, having composed a memoir about her experiences and maintained a New York Times blog on the topic. Her new volume capitalizes on that work, at once testifying to the power of writing about cancer and offering practical advice to those who would like to follow her lead.
Cancer fragments the self because it both is and is not of the body it inhabits. Despite the martial metaphors with which we often discuss them, cancerous cells are not invaders. Instead, they are one’s own organs made strange, the body transformed into an instrument of its own undoing. Grappling with the horror of this feeling, Gubar speaks of the disease’s “imperialism of the not-me-in-me,” a syntactical knot that encourages those bound up in it to untie themselves. An experience of exile from the self, cancer is frightening to the very extent that it is familiar on an almost cellular level.
When we write about cancer, Gubar suggests, it’s partly to make sense of and work through this experience of alienation. Pulled one way by our bodies and another by the doctors who would heal us, we write to regain some sense of agency. “The writing process enables a reconstitution of the self,” she proposes in her preface, before going on to argue that it also allows us to reckon with the ways cancer changes that self: “Be it angry or sorrowful, defiant or resigned, courageous or fearful, this emergent voice helps us understand who we are becoming.” Gubar refuses to treat cancer as “a rewarding opportunity.” Nevertheless, the writing that cancer inspires can, paradoxically, let us rebuild on our own terms.
Donald Gray
Though Gubar’s book bears the subtitle “How Words Heal,” the point isn’t—and cannot be—that writing cures us. (That, Gubar clearly states, is the work of doctors.) But she still holds that writing might serve as “a restorative activity that supplements standard medical responses to cancer.” Disease destroys life, but writing helps to amplify it, however much or little we might have left. “Whereas cancer has been the bane of my life,” Gubar observes, “writing has been its boon.” Such labors cure only in the way salt cures a hunk of meat, making it a little smaller, a little easier to live with, and maybe even a little more delicious.
The cult of positive thinking can provoke an impulse to self-censorship in patients, a desire not to trouble others with the ugly truth of one’s own conditions. Though Gubar’s suggested writing prompts don’t demand negativity, they also refuse to shy away from it, thereby encouraging readers to push back against that inclination: “Celebrate or castigate a doctor or nurse,” she suggests in one list of possible topics. “Argue for a specific improvement in cancer care,” she proposes in another. Composing essays—or poems, or lists, or diary entries—along these lines might, she holds, help us distance ourselves from sickness, but it can only do so if we first engage with the reality of it. Thus, though she acknowledges that it’s hard not to write with others in mind, she aims to help patients write about their own experience in their own ways—not as stories already told, not as cultural myths, not as comforting clichés.
This commitment to personal particularity may limit the book’s usefulness for some. Observing that she and her fellow patients “have had more than enough prescriptions,” she declines to offer much in the way of definitive advice. Instead, much of the book records her own writing experiences, experiences that few readers will share—partly because everyone’s cancer is different, and partly because almost no one has the opportunity to blog about illness for the New York Times.
Gubar does, however, survey a great deal of other work about cancer. Though such explorations crop up throughout, she makes them the focus of her second chapter, which looks at cancer memoirs, and of the third, in which she investigates other art works inspired by the disease. Though she’s an accomplished critic, Gubar typically eschews close reading or theoretical analysis of these texts, instead offering plot summaries or descriptions of especially significant passages. The range of her reading is impressive, but these synopses are rarely engaging on their own, though in aggregate they reaffirm her insistence that there’s no normative way of writing about cancer. Cancer in all its varieties—from minor diagnoses like my papillary thyroid cancer to more aggressive conditions like Gubar’s—can mean many things in many ways, but all of them make the world a little more confusing. Gubar invites us to tarry with these befuddlements, working toward our own answers but accepting that they may not arrive.
Etymologically speaking, a patient is one who suffers, but cancer patients must also be patient, since they spend so much of their time waiting—for treatment to begin or to end, for test results to arrive, for remission, for a cure. Gubar’s book isn’t a definitive statement so much as it is a story about the many ways she busied herself herself throughout own patient hours, and a warm reminder that we can all fill those empty intervals.
There is, my own diagnosis taught me, no such thing as life after cancer; the disease irrevocably reshapes our sense of who we are. I have been fortunate: On most days, the only memento of my own illness is the scar on my neck where my thyroid came out, there whenever I glance in the mirror. An inch and a half long, it resembles nothing so much as the lined rule of the notebook I scribbled in while I was sick. Even now, I read it as an invitation to write.
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Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal by Susan Gubar. W.W. Norton.
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