Of Malady and Mortality: Five Books to Read When Your Spouse Is Diagnosed with Cancer

When my wife was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, I instinctively reached for books. Not medical tomes or statistical survival guides—though I eventually read those too—but books that could help me navigate the emotional wilderness of loving someone with a terminal diagnosis.

These books became my companions during our four-year journey with cancer. They offered no false promises, no seven steps to acceptance, no miracle cures—just honest mirrors reflecting the complex terrain of love, illness, mortality, and the bittersweet privilege of caring for someone at the end of their life.

*

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

When Deena was diagnosed, this was the first book I reached for. Published in 1980, Lorde’s raw, unflinching account of her breast cancer diagnosis, mastectomy, and the emotional aftermath remains startlingly relevant.

As a Black lesbian feminist poet facing the medical establishment of the 1970s, Lorde brings a critical eye to the politics of cancer treatment, offers deep insight into the psychological experience of confronting mortality, and illuminates the way that queer and female friendship is as important—more important—than any chemical treatment.

“Your silence will not protect you,” Lorde wrote. It’s a famous line. I’d forgotten it came from The Cancer Journals. The book stands as a powerful antidote to the isolation that too often come with a cancer diagnosis, reminding us that our private suffering has political dimensions, and that community and connection remain vital—always.

Lorde shows us how to maintain our full humanity—our anger, our grief, our sexuality, our joy—even as the cancer industrial complex tries to reduce us to patient-hood.

Like Audre, Deena didn’t want to be “brave”—as Deena’s spouse, I didn’t want to be brave, either—but we had no choice. And that unchosen bravery, Lorde reminded us, could transform us: “What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

In dusty pink waiting room after dusty pink waiting room, Deena and I discovered the tyranny of positivity that pervades cancer culture.

“You’ll beat this!” “Stay positive!” “You’re a warrior!” The relentless pressure to maintain a cheerful outlook becomes its own burden, layering guilt on top of fear when our natural feelings of anger, grief, and pure rage emerged.

Ehrenreich, who experienced earlier-stage breast cancer herself, took on the pink ribbon people and brilliantly dissected the cult of positive thinking that dominates American approaches to all illness, particularly cancer. The chapter on “Cancerland” should be required reading for anyone navigating a cancer diagnosis or supporting someone who is.

Because this is what is true: Pink-ribbon cheerfulness often serves corporate interests more than patients, and it creates a culture where those who don’t “think positive” enough are somehow to blame for their illness or prognosis.

In a world that pressures cancer patients to become gurus of Hallmark-like platitudes, Ehrenreich’s own “lessons learned” let me exhale with relief:

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

Bright-Sided gave Deena and me permission to honor all of our grumpiness and negativity—along with our radical happiness in being alive and in love. (Because it turns out that forced optimism doesn’t just make grief harder, it’s a total killjoy.)

And don’t even get Ehrenreich started on why “battle” metaphors for cancer are both inadequate and potentially super harmful. Ok, maybe do get her started.

Teva Harrison, In-Between Days: A Memoir About Living with Cancer

Harrison’s childlike-in-the-best-ways graphic memoir about living with metastatic breast cancer in her thirties offers something rare and precious: a magical guide to living fully while we’re dying. Simple, expressive illustrations and brief, poetic essays perfectly capture the strange and liminal space of terminal illness—where ordinary pleasures take on extraordinary meaning, where the future simultaneously contracts and expands, where time itself becomes an ever-morphing concept.

And Harrison refuses to traffic in platitudes—discipline that, believe me, is hard to find in Cancerland. She doesn’t pretend that cancer is a “gift” or a “journey” or a “battle.”

Instead, she shows us how we can use art and love to accommodate metastatic cancer without surrendering to it entirely—how we can make space for fear and grief while living in our joy, creativity, and connection. Her honesty about her changing body, her marriage, her identity as an artist, and her complex feelings about experimental treatments helped me connect to my wife’s experience even when it was too hard to talk about it.

Harrison died in 2019, the year Deena was diagnosed, but her book remains a luminous reminder that the time between diagnosis and death isn’t just waiting and dying—it’s living.

Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Kay Turner (editor), Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

This collection of intimate notes exchanged between my literary icons Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas isn’t about cancer or caregiving, but about enduring queer love.

These short, tender notes—written on scraps of paper, menus, and the backs of manuscripts—trace the everyday choreography of a lasting partnership. Queer love persists, and becomes a shield against the world through routines, inside jokes, pet names, and small gestures.

“Baby precious sweet and mine, baby precious all the time,” Stein writes to Toklas. Their love language is both grandly romantic and deliciously mundane.

In my role as a caregiver and a femme, the Stein-Toklas correspondence reminded me that roles don’t have to serve the patriarchy. We can serve each other, that love doesn’t disappear under the pressures—even of the cancer industrial complex, even of illness itself—it transforms, adapts, finds new expressions.

Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

If there’s one book I wish I’d read earlier in my wife’s illness, it’s this challenging, poetic meditation on dying by Stephen Jenkinson, a former palliative care counselor. Unlike most books on death and dying, Die Wise doesn’t offer comfort or coping strategies. Instead, it confronts our culture’s profound death-phobia and asks us to consider what it might mean to die well in a death-denying society.

Jenkinson’s lyrical prose and unflinching honesty create a space where readers can begin to rehearse the inevitable. He doesn’t soften death’s edges or offer false reassurances. Rather, he invites us to look directly at mortality—our loved ones’ and our own—and to reconsider what constitutes a “good death” in modern times.

Die Wise helped me understand why my wife’s oncologists never spoke clearly about prognosis, why hospice felt both essential and inadequate, and why finding meaning in dying matters as much as finding meaning in living. Deena wanted nothing to do with this book—she didn’t want to die at all, so dying “wise” wasn’t an appealing pitch—but it gave me a place to hold my realism amid her relentless hope.

*

When our friends didn’t know what to say, when doctors inevitably said the wrong thing, these five books helped me find my footing and stay grounded in my love. Like the best writing, they made me feel less alone as the authors, dead and alive, whispered the truth of their experience into my mind.

They offered me the poetics of cancer when I was tired of contemplating the biology of it, and they offered connection—a reminder that cancer is as common as pennies and that death is even more universal. They helped me remember that even when we’re facing the death of our beloved, the same things mattered in our marriage: Moments of depth, laughter in dark humor, and our enduring faith in queering love.

______________________________

Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer by Ariel Gore is available via The Feminist Press.