Writing the Grit of Cancer

 

Writers With Cancer, part 1

As you would expect, people who write for a living are going to write about their cancer, although this is not always the case. One evening while doing research online, I found a list of poets, novelists, essayists, and nonfiction writers. I know there are many more writers to discover and realize that this beginning list has only contemporary ones. There are also writers throughout history to discover who wrote their own cancer accounts.

What I would love is for each writer to publish a book with all of their cancer writings in one place so that I don’t have to search through everything they’ve written and piece the snippets together. Many mention their cancer here and there in essays and poems as they continue to write about other topics. Having their writings in one place would allow me to see how they get into the grit of living with cancer, what the days of struggle and doubt feel like, the warm rush of hope when a treatment starts working, as well as how their understanding of the trauma they went through has changed over the years.

Some writers include details of the medical procedures along with the physical and emotional trauma. Others gloss over the medical with such a wide paintbrush that I can’t tell what treatments they had or what emotional turmoils they struggled with. I do not learn much from them. Quite a few writers choose to use the fact of having cancer as a springboard for writing about the concepts they had to face, like the meaning of suffering, the role of joy in life, and reconciliation with death.

Some writers decide not to write about their cancer, choosing to continue writing about their life-long passions, feeling that their own suffering is like the suffering that everyone else goes through, so why write about it. But then, why write about romance, the thrill and agony of athletic competition, or anything else? What makes it different and important is that we are telling our story with our particulars and in the way that only we can.

Barry Lopez chose to not to write about his prostate cancer because he wanted to continue writing about nature and ecology. John Updike wrote little about his terminal lung cancer because he only knew he had cancer for one month before he died. We have to imagine how he would have explored this new subject. Audre Lorde kept a journal about her breast cancer, had it published, and went back to writing about gender rights. Although Susan Sontag had three different kinds of cancer, she never wrote much about her personal experiences with them, as far as I can tell, even in her journals.

Describing the medical procedures is one focus. Exploring one’s physical and emotional reactions is another. Searching for the meaning of having cancer is a third topic, and one that generally comes later because you’re busy going to appointments and getting treatments, and distance is needed for reflection. When I was actively going through treatments, I wanted to read everything I could find about what other people experienced during their treatments, every ache and setback, so that I would know I wasn’t alone in the trauma I was going through. Thoughts about what it meant came later.

I suspect that if you have a terminal cancer diagnosis, you mention everything you think of — your treatments, the physical pain, the emotional stress, and your philosophical reflections, because your time is short. These reflections would probably deepen if you had more time and could look back. Tony Hoagland had a couple of years to write several essays and a bunch of poems on pancreatic cancer that appeared in his last books before he died.

There are a number of memoirs I value that were written by people who were dying. These single books are all they had time to write — Nina Riggs, Miriam Engelberg, Ilyse Kusnetz, and Julie Hungiville Lemay. Some of them didn’t live long enough to see their books published. Others survived their cancer, or are living with it as they continue to be sustained by treatments, wrote about it in one book, sometimes two, and moved on to write about other topics, like Suzanne Stempek Shea, Kate Bowler, and Suleika Jaouad.

Not everyone’s cancer writing appeals to me, especially if they’re writing poetry. I understand the poetry of Katie Farris and Ifor Thomas. But with some styles of poetry, it’s hard for me to tell what’s going on or what the poet is physically going through, like Jorie Graham and Christian Wiman. Their poetry books have poems on a variety of subjects, and it’s not always clear which poems are about cancer.

Someone writing honestly and emotionally about their breast cancer can help me more with my prostate cancer than someone who writes about their prostate cancer but without using adjectives. I think it also has to do with how much of the humanity and humility of the author I feel, as well as how much compassion they express for others who are suffering.

The core of every piece of writing about one’s cancer should come from the heart. Cancer is not a head trip. The heart is where cancer patients live and connect with each other.

Having cancer is as much about how you emotionally respond to it as it is a medical reality. This is what I want to read.

© 2026 Mark Liebenow