Archives: September 2014

Jenny Diski’s Diagnosis

A memoir in the London Review of Books

Jenny Diski, one of Britain’s finest critics and writers, has been diagnosed with cancer. She’s decided to write about it, after overcoming the initial embarrassment at having to play a role in which ‘no novel responses are possible’. Is this not a novel response? 

We’d hardly got home before I said: ‘Well, I suppose I’m going to write a cancer diary.’ The only other thing I might have said was: ‘Well, I’m not going to write a cancer diary.’ Right there: a choice? I’m a writer, have been since I was small, and have earned my living at it for thirty years. I write fiction and non-fiction, but it’s almost always personal. I start with me, and often enough end with me. I’ve never been apologetic about that, or had a sense that my writing is ‘confessional’. What else am I going to write about but how I know and don’t know the world? I may not make things up in fiction, or tell the truth in non-fiction, but documentary or invented, it’s always been me at the centre of the will to put descriptions out into the world. I lie like all writers but I use my truths as I know them in order to do so.

‘I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?’ I used this quote from Malone Dies as the epigraph to my non-fiction so-called travel book Skating to Antarctica, though it would have been apt, to my mind, at the front of any book I’ve written, fiction or non-fiction, memoir or travel, history or fantasy. Skating concerned a voyage I took around the Antarctic peninsula and the story of my rather brief, rackety relationship with my mother. ‘You know,’ I’d say gayly to people who asked what it was about. ‘Icebergs, mothers. That sort of thing.’ I couldn’t even describe the most extraordinary landscape on the planet without reference to myself and my life outside the Antarctic cruise. I can’t use my eyes to see things without my eyes knowing that what they see is conditioned by what I’ve known and what I’ve been. Ditto my mind to think things. So be it. I’m a writer. I’ve got cancer. Am I going to write about it? How am I not? I pretended for a moment that I might not, but knew I had to, because writing is what I do and now cancer is what I do, too.

Medicine and its Metaphors

An extract from Eula Biss's On Immunity

An extract from Eula Biss’s On Immunity: An Inoculation, forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions in February 2015, appears in Guernica this month:

Whenever I complained of a sore throat as a child, my father would press his fingers gently behind my jawbone, checking for swollen lymph nodes. “I think you’re going to be okay,” he would say upon completing his examination. This was his verdict, too, when I called him from college, miserably ill with what he identified as “probably influenza.” I asked him if there was anything I could do and he suggested, to my disappointment, drinking plenty of fluids. Then he recommended his grandmother’s prescription for a bad cold—buttered toast dipped in warm milk. He described the way the butter floated on the surface of the milk and how comforting he found his grandmother’s care. I wanted to know if there was some sort of medicine I could take, but what I needed, my father understood, was comfort. As an adult, I still never cease to feel a little surprise when a doctor reaches behind my jawbone to check for swollen nodes. I associate the tenderness of that gesture with my father’s care.

Paternalism has fallen out of favor in medicine, just as the approach to fathering that depends on absolute authority no longer dominates parenting. But how we should care for other people remains a question. In his discussion of efforts to control childhood obesity, the philosopher Michael Merry defines paternalism as “interference with the liberty of another for the purposes of promoting some good or preventing some harm.” This type of paternalism, he notes, is reflected in traffic laws, gun control, and environmental regulations. These are limits to liberty, even if they are benevolent. Interfering with the parenting of obese children, he argues, is not necessarily benevolent. There is risk in assigning risk. Children who are already stigmatized for their body type are further targeted. And families who are identified as “at risk” for obesity become at risk to discriminatory oversight. The prevention of risk, Merry observes, is often used to justify a coercive use of power.

 

Fitz Carraldo Editions