How to Write Illness

Abstract

When it comes to writing illness, our bodies are contested, questioned, consumed. Our bodies are controlled and maintained. When there is a physical or psychological rupture in a person’s relationship to their body, self, and surrounding world, is there a temporal disruption that occurs and calls into question their identity, capabilities, life projects? How do they cope with the disruption of self, or begin to reconstruct their story? And can these stories even still be called narratives, in their often radically fragmented form? What are the implications of plot in illness narratives? This critical essay seeks to define the types of illness narratives that exist and study how these stories help people make sense of the world, how these texts work as both art and strategy for navigating lived experience, such as time, process and change. Through the following nonfiction narratives of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals, and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, I seek to understand how psychological and physical trauma and their sociocultural contexts shape the composition of these autobiographical accounts and the ways in which their ill subjects reconstruct (or evade reconstructing) their lives around their disease.