Will I love The Cancer Journals?

This book was my survival guide for facing a serious illness.

I learned so much from the way this self- described “Black lesbian feminist mother lover poet” remade herself in the process of recovering from cancer. Lorde is a prophet of radical transformation. And one of her key tools was her dreams.

She taught us that change comes from looking inward and by giving voice to what one finds there. And the book contains one of the most amazing dreams I’ve ever read: near the end of her life, Lorde dreamt she wanted to take a course in “language crazure”:… show more.

Like everything Audre Lorde wrote, this slim book is powerful and revolutionary. Lorde refuses to see her breast cancer as just a personal problem, and instead, as a Black lesbian feminist, traces its origins to larger economic, industrial, and political forces, including food additives and air pollution. Her activist research is impressive, but it is her fierce, bold critiques that I find most inspiring. She calls out the medical establishment, “We live in a profit economy and there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer.” She condemns psychological “causes” of… show more.

Lorde begins The Cancer Journals by asserting that every woman who has breast cancer reacts to it her own way. I found that idea, expressed in Lorde’s generous, but firm prose, very comforting following my own diagnosis: “Each woman responds to the crisis that breast cancer brings to her life out of a whole pattern, which is the design of who she is and how her life has been lived.” Reading Lorde made me feel less alone as a breast cancer patient.