Frissure

"This book is about the poet Kathleen Jamie’s diagnosis, treatment and recovery from breast cancer. She describes in the introductory essay how she had a mastectomy and was a tired of the medical gaze as experienced in all her clinical consultations, and wanted to have a contrasting kind of gaze. For friend of hers, the artist Brigid Collins, she sat for a series of portraits of her mastectomy scar. And in the eyes of the artist the scar becomes all sorts of things. It becomes a horizon. It becomes a rose stem. It becomes the line of the seashore. And it was during this process they began to feel there was an imbalance there. Jamie needed to write some poems too to accompany the painting and sculptures. And so she begins to write short prose poems, mostly about the process of healing and the transformation that comes about in her own sense of herself during a protracted period of convalescence. Jamie accomplishes what Virginia Woolf was lamenting that we don’t have. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She writes about her summer of convalescence where nobody asked anything of her for the first time in her life. Nobody expected anything except that she walk and read and heal. And how that time to heal is such a great gift. So it’s a book which is utterly original and gets at something very real and valuable about convalescence. Sometimes I find myself recommending it to patients. Of course I recommend books with titles like How To Manage Your Anxiety . But I have had conversations with women who have mastectomies about Jamie’s book, for example. I’ve had conversations with men who’ve had prostate cancer about Broyard. There’s an amazing essay written in the 1970s by Ursula Le Guin about menopause called The Space Crone . She urges women to claim menopause as a valuable transition in life, a liberating transformation, something like an opportunity to be grasped, and I’ve recommended it to women going through menopause. I’ve known people suffering PTSD after military deployment in Afghanistan, and have recommended they read Redeployment by Phil Clay. Generally no. Medicine is a very different world to publishing. There’s something about medical training that is so taxing in the early years that often other interests get pushed out. I don’t know. I think writing and reading is a source of solace and it fuels my enthusiasms, and always has. At high school they gave me prizes for English and for Biology , and it always felt as if they were two things I could combine. Chekhov famously said literature was his mistress, and medicine his lawful wife. But that seems an odd way to put it. For me they are complementary. They support and nourish one another, and the relation they bear is not one of rivals, but more like the left and the right foot of a steady gait."