Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression

Notes

— 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: Re›ections 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 Mif›in, 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. / 139 / 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. Nuland, How We Die: Re›ections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 24. Arlene Croce, “Discussing the Undiscussable,” New Yorker, December 26, 1994, 54. 25. Richard Goldstein, “The Croce Criterion,” Village Voice, January 3, 1995, 8. 26. Patrick Smith, “What Memory Forgets,” The Nation, July 27–August 3, 1998, 30. 27. Smith, “What Memory Forgets,” 30. 28. Laura Miller, “The Last Word,” New York Times Book Review, February 8, 2004, 31. 29. Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review, February 9, 2003, 10. 30. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (Ash‹eld, Mass.: Paris Press, 2002). 31. James Fenton, “Turgenev’s Banana,” New York Review of Books, February 13, 2003. 32. Julian Barnes, introduction to Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain, trans. by Julian Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 33. Leonard Kriegel, “The Body of Imagination,” The Nation, November 9, 1998, 26. 34. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). 35. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1998), xii. 36. Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 37. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993). 38. Hunter argues that “only recently, as we have begun to live long enough to fall victim to chronic disease, have very many stories been written to examine illness as the individual experiences it” (Doctors’ Stories, 153). Hawkins states, “As a genre, pathography is remarkable in that it seems to 140 / Notes to Pages 6-12 have emerged ex nihilo; book-length personal accounts of illness are uncommon before 1950 and rarely found before 1900” (Reconstructing Illness, 3). Couser suggests (in his introduction) that the proliferation of illness narrators may mirror the tendency of marginal groups after the civil rights movement to assert their right to speak. Leonard Kriegel cites a greater number of books that deal with the actual bodily experience of illness and its rami‹cations. He observes, “In essays, memoirs, poems and plays, if rarely in ‹ction, the ills to which ›esh is heir are now examined...