Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness. Kathlyn Conway. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2007. x+264 pp.
Reviewed in conjunction with Ethos 35.4 by: Aaron T. Seaman, Graduate Student, University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Human Development
Originally published in 1997 and recently re-released as part of the series Conversations in Medicine and Society, Kathlyn Conway’s Ordinary Life details her experience with breast cancer. From the initial discovery of cancer during a mammogram, she guides readers through her mastectomy, chemotherapy and breast reconstruction, layering this present cancer experience with her past experience with Hodgkin’s disease.
Using narrative to make sense of an illness experience certainly is not without precedent (Capps and Ochs 1995; Broyard 1992; Frank 1991; Kleinman 1988; Mattingly and Garro 2000). What distinguishes her memoir is the candidness it offers mainstream readers: Conway does not soften the experience of cancer to make it seem manageable. In fact, everywhere possible—from the foreword to the review quotations on the back cover—Conway’s work is framed as a hard-nosed response to “the peculiarly American story line of positive self-regeneration” (p. viii). At one point, she writes of a time when she sought out books by women with similar experiences, “I find few descriptions that fit my experience. I resent reading glib, cute stories about cancer not being so bad, and I hate hearing that cancer has made someone a better person. It’s only making me a worse person” (p. 193). In response, what she presents is not a journey of calm acceptance, spiritual transformation or post-illness rebirth, and as reader, one is unflinching witness to her near-constant struggle to claw her way back to normalcy, back to her eponymous ordinary life. She crafts a work that makes less of an attempt to examine her experience in hopes of “understanding” than to detail its emotional and mental toll. The tone is almost journalistic in nature.
The most useful narratives, however, move beyond journalistic recounting. Broyard (1992) and Frank (1991) used narrative as a tool to structure their experiences with cancer, much as Conway does. However, each then turned to his respective field—literary criticism and sociology—to exam the narrative in terms of a larger conversation about the experience of illness. Frank’s seminal work (1995) proposed the restitution, chaos, and quest illness typologies that continue to be discussed, examined, and built upon (Shohet 2007; Thomas-MacLean 2004). Such discourse leads to a better understanding of illness, which, ultimately, might contribute to easing the experience of illness.
The psychologist Murray (2000) writes that a story “is not fully the narrator’s story: its structure is conditioned by both the immediate presence of others and the dominant plot lines in society. The challenge is to articulate the telling of illness narratives across these different levels” (p. 344). Conway, a psychotherapist, has such an opportunity for articulation, and it is here that perhaps she falls short.
While Conway has provided a narrative that captures what she feels was her true phenomenological experience of breast cancer and works hard to remind the reader that that narrative runs counter to the mainstream story, she does little to place her story within a more connected, more reflective framework of an experience of breast cancer in Western culture. She does not seek to explore the roots of her anger at “glib, cute stories about cancer not being so bad,” which might well have engaged a discussion to dismantle the sociocultural discourse that makes such stories the gold standard. While she touches on the effects her experience with Hodgkin’s disease has on her current breast cancer experience, a larger discussion of recurrence would add to the growing body of research on the trauma of cancer (Mundy and Baum 2004). Her interactions provide a path for examining the co-constructive nature of narratives, one that is looked down, but not taken. She uses the metaphor of a quilt for her life. However, a more accurate metaphor might be woven fabric, and—to extend the metaphor—the reader would glimpse the ways in which the various threads of providers, family, friends, and others experiencing cancer tug on each other, but see little of the whole fabric, as shaped and colored by those different threads.
Conway’s undertaking is partially successful. When offered the possibility to explore her experience both for herself and for the larger cancer culture, to anchor the experience in a way that might reveal meaningful commonalities with others’ experiences, she does not reflect and examine, leaving a less-than-full conversation of medicine and society. However, as the veneer of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap narrative pervades many memoirs of adversity in American culture, the necessity of counter-bootstrap narratives in mainstream media is clear. Scholarly work might recognize the diversity of illness narratives that exist, but most media still treat stories of illness to Hollywood endings that leave the protagonist triumphant and transformed or accepting and dying. Ordinary Life was a stark, necessary contrast to those mass media sentiments when it first was published and remains so a decade later.
REFERENCES CITED
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