Beyond Words

Illness and the Limits of Expression

Kathlyn Conway

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780826353245
• eBook ISBN: 9780826353252
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Creative Writing

“Kathlyn Conway opens primordial questions about the shattering events of illness through close readings of selected illness narratives, proposing that only writing of a daring kind can utter the knowledge of the self-telling body. Wielding her ferocious intellect and braving exposure to self and other, Conway makes original discoveries about writing and illness and, more stunningly, about writing and life. Not a book about illness, this is a book about writing and being. It is taut, brave, unequalled in our scholarship, and true. Conway joins our most powerful investigators of the human predicament of mortality, helping us to see, helping us to live.”—Rita Charon, Columbia University, Program in Narrative Medicine

Published accounts of illness and disability often emphasize hope and positive thinking: the woman who still looked beautiful after losing her hair, the man who ran five miles a day during chemotherapy. This acclaimed examination of the genre of the illness narrative questions that upbeat approach. Author Kathlyn Conway, a three-time cancer survivor and herself the author of an illness memoir, believes that the triumphalist approach to writing about illness fails to do justice to the shattering experience of disease. By wrestling with the challenge of writing about the reality of serious illness and injury, she argues, writers can offer a truer picture of the complex relationship between body and mind.

– Notes –

Introduction

1. Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life (New York: Scribners Classics, 1994), 180.

2. Kathlyn Conway, Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness (New York: W. H. Freeman), 1997.

3. Price, A Whole New Life, 180.

4. Nancy Mairs, in Foreword to G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), x.

5. Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, & Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77.

6. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, 79–80.

7. G. Thomas Couser, Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 5.

8. Couser, Recovering Bodies, 39.

9. Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration (New York: Norton, 1979); Bernie Siegel, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients (New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body’s Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Deepak Chopra, Creating Health: How to Wake Up the Body’s Intelligence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).

10. Chopra, Creating Health, 69.

11. Chopra, Creating Health, 70–71.

12. Weil, Spontaneous Healing, 23.

13. Esther Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000).

14. The March 15, 2004, issue of Cancer reports on an Australian study that concludes that “patients with a positive attitude fared no better than their less upbeat peers.”

15. Christina Middlebrook, Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying Before I Do (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 4.

16. Middlebrook, Seeing the Crab, 4.

17. Heather Jose, Letters to Sydney: Hope, Faith and Cancer (Bloomington, Ind.: Authorhouse, 2004), 160.

18. John Gunther, Death Be Not Proud: A Memoir (New York: Harper Perennial, 1949).

19. Betty Rollins, First You Cry (New York: HarperCollins, 1976).

20. Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (New York: Berkley Books, 2000).

21. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Touchstone, 1969).

22. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor, 1989).

23. Sherwin B. Nula...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• I. The Cultural Story of Triumph
• II. Character: The Damaged Self
• III. Plot: The Disrupted Life
• IV. Searching for a Language
• V. Narrative Form
• VI. Endings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Afterword
• Index