The Cancer Journals

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.