Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression

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Beyond Words Kathlyn Conway Illness and the Limits of Expression Beyond Words Kathlyn Conway is also the author of Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness. She is a practicing psychotherapist in New York. Cover illustration courtesy of sozaijiten/Datacraft Cover design by Karen Mazur 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. University of New Mexico Press Literature and Medicine Series unmpress.com | 800-249-7737 “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 “Demolishes the stereotypical cultural responses to serious illness that we have all become so accustomed to—the suggestion that having a potentially lethal disease makes one wiser or stronger, for example, or the implication that survival is a form of victory, a testament to personal strength and correct thinking, rather than a product of luck and circumstance. Conway is interested in the threshold beyond which both words and metaphors fail; the pain, loneliness, and terror that resist description and yet are central to the experience of patients. Conway’s book is a breath of fresh air—a book whose thesis, clarity of purpose, and rigor have been informed not only by scholarship but also by her personal struggles as a cancer patient.”—Frank Huyler, author of The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine memoir | Medicine ISBN 978-0-8263-5324-5 ËxHSKIMGy353245zv*:+:!:+:! Conway beyond words statement of purpose: The art of writing and the science of medicine offer very different approaches to some of the most intense and mysterious human experiences. The Literature and Medicine series, jointly sponsored by the University of New Mexico Press and the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center, brings together these two ways of understanding. Comprising fiction and creative nonfiction, the series showcases stories that explore the nature of health and healing and the texture of the experience of illness. advisory editors: Elizabeth Hadas, Frank Huyler, M.D., and David P. Sklar, M.D. ...