Illness narratives: from analysis to answerability

This chapter examines the genre of illness narratives. Offering a brief history, it asks how such accounts are mediated; what is at stake; and how they demand their reader to be answerable to them in a dialogical process. The authors enact this approach by offering their respective readerly responses to two illness narratives of breast cancer, Lorde’s 1980 The Cancer Journals and Boyer’s 2019 The Undying. To what extent do these accounts reclaim a voice, unmediated by medical professionals? How has the context changed over time? Next, the chapter briefly examines illness narratives written by physicians, asking how the roles of clinician and patient are reconcilable, and whether the reclamation of the ill person’s voice threatens the medico-centric view illness. Finally, the authors offer a framework for the role of illness narratives in healthcare research, proposing that they not be instrumentalised, but instead function as a conscience of research.