ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the characteristics of the cancer memoir, and tries to account for its growth. It explores the ways in which the cancer pathography has made visible the lived experience of the person with cancer, but has also shaped it according to the demands of narrative. The chapter argues that while the cancer memoir has played an important role in exposing and challenging norms of medical care, at the same time it is historically and culturally determined: its silences are as significant as what it articulates. Cancer memoirs reinstate the patient’s narrative, but not as elicited by a doctor taking a medical history. In the memoir the patient constructs his own narrative, which roams far beyond the medical encounter— indeed the medical encounter itself is scrutinised by the memoirist. Most memoirists linger on this stage of their pre-cancer life, as if they cannot bear to leave it, or might somehow resurrect it through memory alone.
