Writing About Breast Cancer: From Books to Blogs

By Ellen Leopold*

It's easy to forget that women’s writing about breast cancer is of relatively recent vintage. But until the 1970s, the disease was the exclusive province of medical men — and their textbooks. The first women to portray the patient's perspective, to write about their own experience, were established writers and public figures before they took up the disease, with credentials persuasive enough to overcome their publishers' reluctance. Rose Kushner (Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report) was a Washington Post science writer; Betty Rollin (First, You Cry) an NBC correspondent; and Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals, 1980) a well-known poet. These writers transformed their personal stories into public platforms. Brandishing their own case histories as cautionary tales, they helped to introduce radical changes in both the perception and management of the disease. Today's widespread use of breast-conserving surgery, for example, is at least partially attributable to the refusal by some of them — and, in increasing numbers, their readers — to undergo radical mastectomies.

These narratives opened the door to a new breed of breast cancer chronicle. If it was established writers who first carried the disease into print, it now was the disease that carried the writers. Once the pioneers had established a beachhead for breast cancer in the popular culture, it no longer needed to be chaperoned by celebrities. Musa Mayer (Examining Myself: One Woman’s Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery,) was a community mental health counselor; Rosalind MacPhee (Picasso’s Woman: A Breast Cancer Story, 1996) was a paramedic. Juliet Wittman (whose Breast Cancer Journal: A Century of Petals, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1993) was, more typically for the genre, a writer and teacher.

While the early cancer journals had been memoirs with a mission and front-line dispatches, the books of the 1990s turned away from this larger engagement with the disease to opt instead for a more idiosyncratic and/or introspective approach. Titles mirror the change, shifting from the exigent "First Do No Harm…": A Dying Woman’s Battle Against the Physicians and Drug Companies Who Misled Her About the Hazards of the Pill , to the positively laid-back Breast Cancer? Let Me Check My Schedule! almost twenty years later. (For a scholarly analysis of breast cancer memoirs, see Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives, by Mary K. DeShazer.)

Now, in the early twenty-first century, we are witnessing yet another shift, the product of changes in both the nature of publishing and in the cultural standing of the disease. Traditional print publishers may have lost interest in personal narratives, but women have been churning them out in greater numbers than ever before. A veritable tsunami of blogs and diaries has emerged online. Women of almost every age, with every kind of breast cancer, at every stage, post regular updates on their journeys through treatment, giving fine-grained and often critical accounts of their medical ordeals and reporting exchanges with doctors and nurses, family and friends, colleagues and health insurance companies. The urge to share has become so irresistible that meta-level blogs now try to guide readers through the proliferating thicket: Healthline, for example, has compiled a list of The 24 Best Breast Cancer Health Blogs of 2013.

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Writing About Breast Cancer: From Books to Blogs

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