Arthur Frank, _The Wounded Storyteller_

 FRANK IS A sociologist, but one with serious humanities chops—among the touchstones here are Walter Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Spivak’s famous question “can the subaltern speak?” is recast by Frank as “can the patient speak?” The definitive narratives about illnesses are case studies, written by expert observers aiming at the perfect objectivity. What if, Frank asks, we complemented this with more narratives by the ill themselves, relying on experience rather than expertise and explicitly subjective?

This strikes me as obviously a good idea. When the book originally appeared in 1995, it probably was quite a curveball, but over the last 25 years it seems the trend has been exactly as Frank prescribed. I sought out the book when it was cited as particularly influential in a review I read of Anne Boyer’s The Undying.

The core of the book is Frank’s description of three large classes of illness narratives: the Restitution Narrative, in which modern science triumphs over the disease and the sufferer’s old life is regained; the Chaos Narrative, in which the sufferer’s world and selfhood just get dismantled and stop making any kind of sense; and the Quest Narrative, in which the illness is a journey the sufferer takes that transforms them, perhaps giving them some wisdom or gift that the sufferer can then share with others.

Frank is most interested in Quest Narratives. Medical professionals can learn from them what expertise can never teach them about the illness; the community learns something, too, since the sufferer has become a witness giving testimony. Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness are Frank’s main examples.

I read the second edition (2013) edition that includes a new afterword that is definitely worthwhile—that is where Benjamin and Levinas (and a little Aristotle) particularly come into play, with powerful effect. It’s a profoundly moral book, and not at all in the Power-of-Positive-Thinking vein Boyer so sharply critiques.