Dear Mr. Sizzling Sandwich,
Have you ever read Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag? Once when I was very sad I went to the library to cope and found myself on the floor reading that book in one go. I had also been listening to the anthropocene reviewed and it occurred to me that a lot of the things Sontag discussed reminded me of your videos and podcasts about tuberculosis and some of the ideas in TFIOS. It also seems likely that, as an author and person who seems to read a lot of books, especially on the subject of tuberculosis, it would be statistically likely that you had. Anyways, I thought that book was very interesting and wondered what you thought (if you did read it after all).
Sincerely,
A regular sandwich
Yes it was very important to me when writing The Fault in Our Stars, especially. Here is a passage from the opening of Sontag's essay:
"My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill —is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped."
And this is how I wanted to approach TFIOS if I could--to write with a hyperawareness of how people metaphorize, and how the lurid metaphors of cancer especially have shaped (and in many cases harmed) the lives of cancer survivors, but try to find a way not to metaphorize the disease itself, which as Hazel repeatedly says, is just a disease.
But I also relied (and rely!) so much on Illness as Metaphor because of the way it connects historical constructions of tuberculosis to contemporary constructions of cancer. Cancer now is seen in much of the rich world as the most capricious disease, the "robber of youth" (as TB used to be known), as the illness that you may survive through positive thinking or clean living or whatever--which all used to be how we thought of TB.
(This is why the band in The Fault in Our Stars is called "The Hectic Glow," which is something Thoreau said about TB when romanticizing it as a beautiful disease.)
Of course, our current metaphors around TB are very different--TB is now constructed as a disease of dirt and filth and poverty. In time, the same may become true of cancer--already cancer is killing more people in low- and middle-income countries than in rich ones. So the other thing I take from Illness as Metaphor is that the lurid metaphors of disease are not stable or fixed, nor need they be. We can change them together. I tried to contribute to that in whatever small way in TFiOS, but I don't and can't ever know if I succeeded, because that isn't up to me; it's up to the ongoing readers of the story.
