Range of Motion (Pt. 1)

From the Department of Silencing Your Inner Critic, and Also the External Ones

“Memoirs of illness … are sometimes inspirational and sometimes quietly tragic, but usually redemptive. Self-reflection on maladies has become such a commonplace that it is almost impossible to bring freshness to the project.” – Andrew Solomon, New York Times, March 1, 2022

“If you’re writing about situations that affect thousands (or millions) of people, that’s not necessarily in your favor. Addiction and cancer memoirs, for example, are common, and will put you on the road to rejection unless you’re able to prove how yours is unique or outstanding in the field.” – Jane Friedman, “How to Write a Book Proposal”

“In our time, the challenge is not to speak into the silence, but to learn to form a resistance to the often obliterating noise.” – Anne Boyer, on writing about cancer

Write the alphabet, the resident said. Write the alphabet with your foot, and so I did. I performed this bottom-rung piece of physical therapy diligently, daily, following orders. I wrote from the alpha to the omega, sketching the ABCs with my toes, gently wobbling my ankle back and forth, flex and point, inversion and eversion, and then starting all over again from the top. I learn my letters to walk as I once learned to write.

When I returned to the orthopedist three weeks later the fracture had worsened, the crack in the bone as a decisive slash where it had been a tentative scribble. What did you do? He said. You shouldn’t have done that. You were supposed to stay still; you were supposed to remain immobile. 

How could I,  in trying to write, have made such a rookie mistake?

I have a history of writing my way through trauma, something I didn’t realize until I wrote it down just now.  I wrote my way through my miscarriage, through the death of my father, and through getting scammed. In this newsletter I wrote my way through cancer, and through 2022’s broken ankle. I’m a good writer, people tell me, and I’m a good patient, the doctors say. How has it come that a broken foot has made me bad? That in doing something I thought would help, I have hurt myself further?

The long-tail cruelty of cancer treatment has made me roundly grateful for my once-healthy body, and has inscribed on that body an urgent awareness of its limitations, its possibilities, and its finite time. Everything I want to do now lives in my muscles and bones, and as the clock ticks onward I’m reminded every day of the loss of strength, of flexibility, of estrogen. A few weeks ago I lay face down on the carpet, a cramp convulsing my calf, and sobbed. A velcro band attached to my foot held a metal transducer the size of a quarter over the Sharpied “X” that marked the spot of my broken bone. It was delivering ultrasonic therapy that is supposed to stimulate growth in my poky bones. It has a $450 copay and I am more convinced that the doctor is in cahoots with the medical device salesman, profiting from a pseudoscience racket that plays on the fear of disabled patients, than I am of the efficacy of this treatment.

Somehow, in recent weeks, I sprained (?) my thumb from using the cane that was my constant companion until it became too painful to grip. On a trip to New York last month I lurched around town in my walking boot so vigorously, determined to soak up every minute, that by midweek my foot had swelled up like a watermelon. At an event I hosted in Chicago recently I perched passively on a stool, prevented by pain from working the room. Are you bored yet? I am. I am so agonizingly bored by this story my body is writing, one that as yet has no end, no arc, no moral.

When you’re writing about illness, you are bombarded by reminders that your story – this story that has consumed your life – is boring. Repetitive. Commonplace. Self-indulgent. What could be more recursive than this endless assessment of corporeal possibility? Writing about illness may be therapeutic, but it is rarely art, runs the narrative. You may think you’re helping yourself, but in fact by trying to extend your story beyond the particulars of your own pain you might be making yourself vulnerable. You might fail. You might be making it worse.

There are ramifications to writing about illness, just as there are ramifications for any expression of trauma. Beyond being dismissed as boring, there is the threat of being dismissed as wrong – of having your own expertise over your own experience doubted, or your pain minimized. The knowledge that someone, somewhere, always has it worse can be stifling, as the writer Phil Christman eloquently explained the other day. And, of course, it can be hazardous to your financial security – whether you’re a worker bee carefully counting sick days or a corner office power broker. When publishing executive Julia Cheiffetz wrote about her experience of being diagnosed with cancer and having her insurance cut off while on maternity leave from her high-powered job at Amazon, friends warned her not to jeopardize her career by going public. Because the last thing the bean counters want is a working mother with cancer.

Last month I came across a video of novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett talking about her aversion to books about cancer. Patchett has herself written about cancer and its fallout, both in Truth and Beauty, her intimate memoir of her friendship with the poet Lucy Grealy, and more recently in “These Precious Days,” an essay on her relationship with Tom Hanks’s personal assistant Sooki Raphael, who quarantined with Patchett and her husband in 2020  while receiving treatment in Nashville for pancreatic cancer. And yet, she says, “I don’t read cancer memoirs.” Her book about Grealy, who died in 2002 (and which caused Grealy’s family pain), was all she could handle. “I see a cancer memoir and I just take a big step to the side because – enough. I’ve done it.” 

That Patchett, an influential novelist and bookseller with a reputation as a good literary citizen, could dismiss an entire genre on its face struck me as a little ungenerous, to say the least. Of course no reader is required to read across all subjects and genres. First of all, that would be impossible, and second: personal preference is a thing. And, for context, the comments were a preamble to a full-throated endorsement of Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms, a cancer memoir that I, too, unreservedly love. But Patchett confesses that when the book came out a few years ago she ignored it, filing the galley away in some “do not read” corner of her mind. (And a “do not sell” corner of the store? Unclear.) She didn’t return to it until she watched American Symphony, the recent documentary about Jaouad’s husband, Jon Batiste, and the twinned experience of writing the titular symphony while Jaouad was hospitalized with a terrifying recurrence of leukemia. When she did, she found Between Two Kingdoms the exception to her self-protective rule – one that speaks to an experience beyond illness. “I realize now,” she says, that Jaouad’s book, and Grealy’s book, and her own, are all telling the same story –  “such a larger story of illness and survival.”

To which my ungenerous thought is, well duh.

We are all telling the same story of life and death, of strength and fragility. That is what makes it powerful. 

The imperative to make your story special  – enjoyable, artful, marketable, palatable – would seem on its face to encourage creativity. But it packs a poisonous hidden message: if you can’t prove you’re special, you’d be better off staying still and small. I believed this for so long – too long – but I’m sick of it now. I’d rather stretch for that full range of motion and try to attach my own steps through the kingdom of the sick to the common march of shared experience. If my story is familiar, pedestrian, if it adds to the noise — so what? The myth of exceptionalism is a tool for repression and, in the legendary words of Audre Lorde, writing of breast cancer, “Your silence will not protect you.” You might as well go down singing.

I found another doctor, one with a better bedside manner, who told a different story about my sad, fragile foot. It’s not your fault, he said. You didn’t do anything wrong. These tiny bones are finicky. They don’t get enough blood and by the way, you’re older than you think. Sometimes it just takes a long time to heal. Walk on it, he said, and in a few weeks start to wean yourself off the boot. So I did: first an hour a day, then several, and then some more, until this week I returned to his office, and while he wasn’t so brazen as to declare my foot good as new it was in its slow and steady way, he said, healing.

Can I use it? I asked. Can I exercise? Can I dance?

His reply: You can do whatever you want.

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So much death and struggle this month, but I promise I have more fun stories to tell soon. I went to New York! Good things are happening! In the meantime, there’s lots of good writing out there in this vein lately, including these recent posts by Maggie Smith and Stephanie Land. Also recommend, specific to writing about cancer, this 2023 essay by Elizabeth Benedict, at The Millions.