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This book has the stated purpose of “elucidating and liberating the use of illness as figures of speech and lurid metaphors,” but the book actually turns into an irrational, strident attack against the concept of emotional factors in cancer.
The New York Times book review of July 16, 1978 observed, “It is a deeply personal book, pretending for the sake of decency to be a thesis.” Neither the reviewer nor the author divulged the nature of the personal problem. Put on its publication date, Susan Sontag gave a press interview in which she discussed her marriage and divorce problems, her devotion to her 17-year-old son and medical conquest of her cancer.
The first part of the book is a sprightly account of the historic attachment of metaphors to tuberculosis. Her allusions to the 19th century literary figures, including Shelley and Keats, who succumbed to TB make colorful, entertaining reading. But already in the introduction she exhibits an argumentative stance which makes this flawed work more irritating and disappointing than provocative, simplistic rather than thoughtful: “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.”
This statement is implicitly anti-literary, surprisingly, as well as anti-psychoanalytic. This arrogant attitude dictates the impression