Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
The cancer talk wrecked me while I was reading it. From page 100 onward, I was hooked. The stark contrast between the sections, when the narrator is hit with the sentence, “Then you won’t be surprised to hear she’s got cancer?” to them talking about what gravity feels like, to the bare conversation that follows afterwards, broke me (Winterson 100). I remember when my great-aunt died of cancer, and the way that nothing feels real in that moment. The whole world fell silent in that moment, and seeing the narrator experience the same thing felt very realistic.
When the narrator returns to reality, the conversation is stripped of descriptors like “he said” and “she said,” and all the reader gets are the facts. It is like a very realistic description of dissociation while dealing with something hard, in the minute you are only focused on getting to the next moment vs trying not break down and scream. The narrator in the scene puts the reader at a distance, which feels very fitting as they now have to reevaluate their whole future, which is now going to look very different. The life they planned with Louise can not be the same. For the narrator, this diagnosis changes the whole world, and they do not invite the reader to watch the dreams fade. Instead, they choose to panic in private, yet the reader feels the grief at losing the future with them. They have to let go of Louise to save her, but letting her go also means sending her back to a life she does not want. To save her is to imprison her, but to free her is to doom life. An impossible choice, but one that is easy to see why the narrator chooses to leave.
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