ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss the memoir I wrote, a memoir about myself being ill. This is not the self-indulgent exercise it initially sounds: firstly, my memoir was written not just in an attempt to make sense of my experiences but also to connect with other women with life-threatening illness; secondly, this chapter is written to communicate the kind of conflicts of identity that illness provokes, and to reflect on the authorial construction of identities in an illness narrative. Autobiographical storytelling is drawn from ‘multiple, disparate and discontinuous experiences and the multiple identities constructed from and constituting those experiences’.1 Our identities are in a state of continuous flux in response to changing contexts over time and are framed by factors such as race, religion, ethnicity, education, sexuality, gender and class. It was my experience that sudden illness can suddenly interrupt these identities and throw them into confusion, inducing changes that are dramatic and intense. As Broyard wrote, ‘My initial experience of illness was as a series of disconnected shocks, and my first instinct was to try to bring it under control by turning it into a narrative.’2 In my own narrative I remember, reflect on and construct not only myself being ill but also the cultures that provoked or interacted with my responses to my illness. In this chapter I focus on the conflict between my identities as ‘mother’ and ‘patient’ and the way I constructed them in the act of writing. Thus, this analytical and interpretive chapter is a second step away from the immediacy of my original illness experiences but it is also another reflective step towards understanding their meaning. Before discussing four extracts from it, I explain the reasons why I chose to write my memoir and why I chose its particular form since both choices informed the way I constructed my fluctuating identities in the memoir.
