Illness as Narrative

Acknowledgments

ix This project found me. The ideas for Illness as Narrative emerged after my husband was diagnosed with cancer for the first time. They began to evolve with a recurrence of that cancer, the diagnosis of a second kind of cancer, and yet another recurrence. The experience of four surgeries and three trips through chemotherapy was his. My experience was defined by all that happened around his diagnoses, treatments, and recoveries, which included listening to stories that people told me just because I’d become a marginal member of the cancer club. Over time, I would find myself in a crowded lecture hall, a grocery store, or the audience of a school play, and I’d be able to connect many of the faces there to stories of suffering. I became conscious of a new, previously invisible dimension of my workplace and my community, which has never faded from view. I want to take a moment to say a bit more about the origins of my project because my acknowledgments of the many people who supported me as I wrote Illness as Narrative are best understood within that context. As a scholar in writing studies, I’ve long been interested in the intersection of literature and literacies, where the aesthetic and rhetorical merge. As stories about illness accumulated around me, I used my training to study their history, politics, and form and thus to connect two parts of my life that otherwise felt intolerably separate . I had my professional life, thinking and writing about how meaning gets made with language, and I had my life in the waiting room, where I heard the stories of the ill, their caregivers, and their loved ones. The task of connecting scholarship to everyday matters of concern became an even more compelling challenge when I realized that the critical practices I’d acquired through years of training weren’t the right tools for the job of interpreting illness memoirs. Critique is all well and good, but I wanted to more fully understand the various aCknowledgments x aCknowledgments functions that narratives about illness perform for writers and readers, speakers and listeners. In order to comprehend the possibilities as well as the limits of writing and reading about illness, I needed either to look somewhere other than the familiar sources or to see those sources from a different perspective. My goal became to find and develop practices that would allow for critical and compassionate analysis. Given the provenance and aims of my project, I first want to express my deep gratitude to those friends and extended family members whose kindness and compassion made it possible for my family to survive the rough years. While there are many people who helped in countless ways, I’d like to express special thanks to those who helped me make time to think, write, and sleep in the midst of it all: the late Jo Kessel Buyske, Ellen Goellner, Anne Caswell Klein, Kathy Pasewark and the Pasewark family, Zori Stern, Lee Talley, and Amanda Irwin Wilkins. Ellen, Anne, Lee, and Amanda did double duty by offering an essential intellectual as well as personal support network. The Department of English at Rutgers University is so large that I can’t thank everyone by name, so I extend my collective gratitude to the faculty and staff for their constant support and optimism. I owe special thanks to my colleague Kurt Spellmeyer for his encouragement and guidance, as well as for demonstrating that it is possible to be a dedicated scholar, writer, and teacher, all at once. I’d also like to thank my students in general and three students in particular. I’m lucky to have had the chance to work with Zeynep Uzumcu, poet, chemist, and researcher extraordinaire, who showed up at exactly the right moment and helped me with the historical research for the first chapter about the rise of the illness memoir as a genre. I’m fortunate, as well, to have had years of good conversations about literature and medicine with my former student Dr. Daniel Marchalik, who is going to find a way to survive his residency and read literature. I am also thankful for Sarah Goldfarb’s essential assistance as I prepared the final manuscript. While working on this book, I had the good fortune to be able to participate in four interdisciplinary working groups, three of which were at Rutgers. Historians Keith Wailoo and Julie Livingston generously invited me to join their group on the...