Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal

by Susan Gubar

Overview

An important addition to the literature of cancer by an award-winning scholar and memoirist.

Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs. To stimulate the writing process, she proposes specific exercises, prompts, and models. In discussions of the diary of Fanny Burney, the stories of Leo Tolstoy and Alice Munro, numerous memoirs, novels, paintings, photographs, and blogs, Gubar shows how readers can learn from art that deepens our comprehension of what it means to live or die with the disease.

From a writer whose own memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “moving and instructive…and incredibly brave,” this volume opens a path to healing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393246995
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	396 KB

About the Author

Susan Gubar is an acclaimed memoirist and literary critic. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. A Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University, she lives in Bloomington.

Editorial Reviews

03/07/2016
Part writing manual, part memoir, and part literary and artistic critique, this companion to Gubar’s New York Times column, “Living with Cancer,” would make a valuable addition to any cancer patient’s bookshelf. In stylish and unflinching prose, Gubar (Memoir of a Debulked Woman) illuminates how writing and reading helped her face ovarian cancer, and how they can help others facing similar battles. She dispenses essential writing advice, such as guidelines and prompts for journaling (“I wish I could tell my oncologist...”), alongside her own experiences putting words to her cancer, from responding to online commenters to discussing a treatment’s embarrassing side effects. She also turns her gaze outward, using her decades in academia to put together a robust survey of relevant literature and art. Gubar may not be the first to address the “cancer canon,” but her deft reading and analysis of writers such as Susan Sontag, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Korda put her at the forefront of the field. Writing, Gubar argues, can return agency and dignity to the potentially dehumanizing experience of cancer treatment. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The book I wish I’d had beside me as I embarked on my own journey through cancer diagnosis and treatment. For, more than any other book I’ve read, it helps us understand precisely what it is that writing can help us accomplish during the most difficult time of our lives, and…understand that we are not alone."

Louise DeSalvo

"[Gubar] 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."

Slate

"Beyond surviving, the greatest challenge after a cancer diagnosis is learning how to live as fully as possible. Gubar’s book shows us how reading and writing about living with cancer can help."

Wendy S. Harpham

"Susan Gubar has given us a wonderful tour of cancer through the written word. There is something for everyone from the newly diagnosed wanting an outlet to understand their disease to the scholar looking for a summary of cancer writing, to the blogger! Should be required reading for all doctors and patients!"

Dr. Susan Love

"In this ambitious and inspiring book, her discussion—happily, in nonacademic language—combines with up-to-date research confirming that writing heals both mind and body. It adds up to a convincing argument that words heal, and you—even if you haven't written a thing since high school—can tap into the power of words."

Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is the book I wish I’d had when I had cancer. Susan Gubar’s clarity and compassion are a model for living with any illness that transforms a life."

Arthur W. Frank

2016-02-15
For cancer sufferers, words can lift the spirit. Literary scholar and memoirist Gubar (Emeritus, English/Indiana Univ.; Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, 2012, etc.) believes she has "been kept alive by a clinical trial and by the New York Times," where she contributes the blog Living with Cancer. Reading about others' experiences with the physical, emotional, and medical tolls of the disease, she writes, has made her feel less isolated. She recommends both, offering helpful advice for those who want to write and candid, insightful responses about the huge number of cancer memoirs—and fiction featuring cancer sufferers—that she has read. Two chapters focus on writing. In one, Gubar offers advice for getting started, with the well-worn strategy of free writing; the other focuses on the particular challenges of blogging. Daily writing, writes the author, "does more than provide an outlet for venting without self-censorship. Even when it tackles the miseries of treatment or the disease's progression, it can also become an escape hatch" and distraction. The miseries of treatment are a frequent theme, as cancer sufferers recount "inadequate doctoring, medical mistakes, alienating hospital environments, economic burdens, and imponderable decision-making that baffles patients confined within ever-circumscribed lives." Many writers rail against doctors' lack of compassion and "inflated egos and insensitivity" even at prestigious cancer centers. When Gubar began her blog in 2012, she resolved not to present cancer as a gift that afforded her some special insight. "I begrudge its existence," she writes, "and bristle at any suggestion that such a pernicious disease can be considered a rewarding opportunity." Nevertheless, writing about cancer has been "creative and deeply satisfying." Drawing on her experience, the author provides several pages of strategies for generating a blog entry: a solution to a cancer-related problem, for example, or explaining why a new word ("scanxiety" or "chemoflage") is needed. Bright, upbeat, and empathetic, Gubar argues convincingly that words have the power to heal.

Kirkus Reviews