Cancer

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi · 2016

Kalanithi was a thirty-six-year-old neurosurgeon — someone who had spent his career standing at the border between life and death on behalf of others — when he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He died before he finished this memoir. What he left behind is one of the most extraordinary documents ever written about living with a terminal diagnosis: about what it means to face the end of your life as a fully conscious, thinking, questioning person who has not finished wanting things. He writes about medicine, about literature, about his wife and the daughter he knew he would not see grow up, about what makes a life meaningful when you know it is ending. It is not a sad book in the way you expect. It is a book about being completely alive right up until the moment you are not.

The Cancer Journals

Audre Lorde · 1980

Lorde was a Black feminist poet when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1978. This book is her account of that experience — raw, political, and completely uninterested in performing the expected kind of courage. She refused to wear a prosthesis. She refused to hide her mastectomy scar. She refused to pretend. And she wrote about all of it with an honesty and an anger that remains radical more than four decades later. Her argument — that silence about illness, about women’s bodies, about fear, is a tool of oppression — is as relevant now as when she made it. For those exhausted by the pressure to be positive, to be brave, to protect everyone else from the reality of what they are living through, Lorde is one of the most important and most liberating companions available.

The Bright Hour

Nina Riggs · 2017

Riggs was a poet and essayist — and a direct descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson — when she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at thirty-eight. She wrote this book while dying and it was published after her death. What is remarkable about it is not its gravity but its lightness: Riggs writes about her diagnosis, her treatment, her children and her husband with a wit and a precision that makes the reading feel like sitting across a table from someone extraordinarily good company. She does not turn her illness into a lesson or a journey. She simply lives it, on the page, with full literary attention. For those who want company that does not make the illness feel larger than the person — this is the book.

A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness · 2011

Originally conceived by the author Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it, and completed by Patrick Ness in her memory, this novel is about thirteen-year-old Conor, whose mother is dying of cancer and who is visited each night by a terrifying monster that demands he tell the truth. It is classified as young adult fiction but it is read by people of every age — because what it is really about is the thing that adults and children alike find hardest to admit when someone they love is dying: the complicated, exhausting tangle of love and fear and grief and anger and relief. It is a masterpiece about the experience of watching someone die, and about the truths we tell ourselves to survive it. For the caregivers, partners, children and friends of those with cancer — this is the book that understands what you are carrying.

One True Thing

Anna Quindlen · 1994

Ellen leaves her career to care for her mother through terminal cancer, a decision that forces her to confront how little she actually knew about the woman she thought was simply “just” a homemaker. Quindlen writes with clear-eyed honesty about how exhausting and unglamorous caregiving really is, alongside the surprising intimacy it can create between a parent and child who are running out of time to really see each other.

The Fault in Our Stars

John Green · 2012

Hazel and Augustus meet in a cancer support group and fall in love anyway, fully aware of how limited their time together might be. Green refuses to let either of them be defined only by illness — they are funny, sharp, and impatient with the way other people treat them like walking metaphors — and the result is a novel that takes cancer seriously without ever reducing its characters to it.

A Walk to Remember

Nicholas Sparks · 1999

A reluctant teenage romance turns into something far more serious once Jamie’s leukaemia diagnosis becomes impossible to ignore. Sparks leans fully into sentiment, but the novel’s gentleness is exactly its point: it is less interested in the mechanics of illness than in what people do with the time they are given, and in how being truly known by someone can matter more than how much time is left to be known.