Narrative empathy and illness memoirs: Arthur Frank'sAt the Will of the Bodyand Kathlyn Conway'sOrdinary Life

Abstract

This article analyses the concept of narrative empathy in illness memoirs. These texts negotiate the narrative identity of an autobiographer as he or she recounts the disruptive experience of illness, an experience in which physical and emotional traces dramatically and definitively shape our sense of self. While narrative emotions are certainly deployed in these autobiographies in order to connect with the readers and promote social change, this empathic connection is not so much aimed at arousing compassion but rather more positive emotions on the experience of illness. I will explore the emotional representations of cancer in Arthur Frank's (1991) and Kathlyn Conway's (1997), focusing on the identity strategies these authors use in order to become affirmative models of disability and illness, showing the damaging effects not of disease or impairment but, rather, of the cultural mythologies that interpret those conditions in reductive or disparaging ways.

“Lifestyle, finitude, or inequality?”: Illness explanation in Kathlyn Conway’s and Arthur Frank’s cancer memoirs

“…It also discusses how she was previously treated for Hodgkin’s disease at age 26 and later diagnosed with early lymphoma at age 45, shortly after her breast cancer went into remission. Both memoirs are influential culturally: both were given second printings by academic publishers and became objects of academic research (see Baena, 2017).…”

“…Secondarily, I illustrate how the finitude model may be used to explain chronic diseases by analyzing two influential cancer memoirs: Frank’s (1991a) At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness and Conway’s (1997) Ordinary Life: A Memoir of Illness . They were chosen not simply because of their importance in popular culture and illness narrative research (Baena, 2017), but also because of the two authors’ importance as critics of health promotion discourse (Conway, 2007; Frank, 1991a).…”