Home > News & Public Affairs > Interchange – How We Talk About Our Dying: Susan Gubar On Living with Cancer
© Donald J. Gray

Interchange – How We Talk About Our Dying: Susan Gubar On Living with Cancer

Play

readingwritingcancer bookcoverIn 2008 Susan Gubar was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer which means that the cancer had metastasized beyond the ovaries into the abdomen or nearby lymph nodes. The statistical prognosis for life expectancy when ovarian cancer is diagnosed in this stage is 3-5 years. In 2012, Gubar became a participant in a Phase One drug trial that she describes in our conversation as a miracle. She is now in what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould termed, in his essay, “The Median Isn’t the Message,” the “right-skewed small tail” of those living with cancer beyond the median of prognosis.

On page 148 of Gubar’s latest book, Reading & Writing Cancer: How Words Heal, published this May by W. W. Norton, she writes: “It seems unlikely that I will remain in a chemically induced remission for the year of production it will take for you to be holding this book in your hands.” The “unlikely” Susan Gubar joins us to discuss how we talk about our dying and the ways reading and writing about it can help us heal.

Our Music for this show, all songs by Jelly Roll Morton, was chosen by Susan Gubar’s husband, Don Gray, a Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. Don Gray appeared on Interchange in 2014 to discuss the Lilly Library’s exhibition of the papers of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of the novel Raintree County.

Segment One offers a brief summary of the path from diagnosis through the memoir and blog to this most recent book which Gubar describes as an attempt to make a start in surveying the lay of the land in the literary canon of cancer writing. We discuss the “tyranny of cheerfulness” and the way the language used to discuss cancer seems to blame the victim as if one should be held personally responsible for the disease.

For Segment Two, metaphor is our primary focus and we learn about some of Gubar’s favorite writing about cancer such as Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” and Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle.” We then turn to the way the literature of cancer often focuses on metaphors like “invasion” and colonization. Finally Susan Gubar, in her most comfortable mode as teacher, suggests ways to compose those “words that heal.”

And in Segment Three we discuss how Gubar put her lifelong practice of writing to work in the blogosphere. She became a contributor for the online New York Times “Well” Blog at the same time she began what she calls her “miracle” trial in August of 2012. The blog has served as a way to help others feel it’s okay, and perhaps even necessary, to feel free to express those aspects of disease’s effects on the body of which one might feel ashamed to reveal. We also talk about cancer memoirist Michael Korda’s analogy comparing African Americans and cancer patients as having to do with the visibility of side effects–an assertion that cancer patients are stigmatized and visible as an other much the way African American’s are conceived of as a visible other, or special group, different from a “quote unquote” norm. We close with the compassionate witnessing available to us through photography and painting, what Courtney Baker has called “humane insight,” in viewing the suffering of others.

GUEST

© Donald J. Gray
© Donald J. Gray

Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, and for the online New York Times “Well” blog, she writes the column “Living with Cancer.” She is also, as she alluded to in her self-introduction at the top of the show, a literary scholar, and one of great influence, co-authoring, with Sandra Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979. This has been called a the foundational work in the field of feminist literary criticism. Gubar has also recently published Judas: A Biography and True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School.

RELATED
Living with Cancer
The Scar Project: Breast Cancer Is Not a Pink Ribbon” (David Jay photographs)
The Median Isn’t the Message” by Stephen Jay Gould
The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy
People Like That Are the Only People Here” by Lorrie Moore (The New Yorker)

MUSIC by Jelly Roll Morton
“Dr. Jazz”
“Jelly Roll’s Blues”
“The Pearls”
“Dead Man’s Blues”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Rob Schoon
Executive Producer: Joe Crawfod

Check Also

Girls Rock: Amy Oelsner

She taught herself how to play the guitar and now she wants to help young …