Description

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde s experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women s pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women s body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, Lorde heals and re-envisions herself on her own terms and offers her voice, grief, resistance, and courage to those dealing with their own diagnosis. Poetic and profoundly feminist, Lorde s testament gives visibility and strength to women with cancer to define themselves, and to transform their silence into language and action.