Elaine Scarry Research Articles

Ouch: Pain, Heard and Referred

The communication of pain has been figured, in both the canonical work of Elaine Scarry and in biomedical discourse, as bringing pain up from bodily depths to a surface where it is visibly manifest to others. This study of acute physical pain in three popular American narrative texts and their film adaptations suggests that the oculocentrism of such accounts has elided the significant role of sound, both verbal and nonverbal, in the expression and witnessing of physical pain. Instances of what was classified in the nineteenth century as sensation literature, these three texts produce direct sensory effects. Scott Smith’s The Ruins (2006) is a horror novel, William Goldman’s Marathon Man (1974) a thriller, and Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) (film: 127 Hours) an adventure-survival memoir. Reading pain in each of three triple texts—book, film, and the screenplay transmitting pain from one to the other—opens up a new archive of pain texts that promise sensation rather than relief, offering a new perspective on the imaginative—and paradoxically ameliorative—creativity brought into being by the notorious recalcitrance of pain. This essay argues for attention to the protolinguistic pain language of groans and screams; for a poetics of “ouch.”

‘The means of life’: Civilizational witnessing in Write to Life’s Souvenirs

Discourses underpinning UK policies such as Fundamental British Values and the Hostile Environment draw justification from framing asylum seekers as threats to western civilizational values and the British way of life. In this article, I examine Write to Life’s play Souvenirs as a remarkable example of ethically informed theatre with a conceptually refined understanding of the practicalities of civilization. Using Elaine Scarry’s theorization of the sheltering room as vital facilitator of civilization, the article explores how this testimonial play intervenes in mainstream discourses that work to hamper the two-way exchange that Kelly Oliver identifies as the foundational witnessing structure of subjectivity. I argue that this framework for interpretation highlights Souvenirs’s framing concepts of the garden and the souvenir scar as illustrating collective possibilities for co-creating civilization based on negotiation rather than enforced legibility.

Monarchy and Politics of Detention in Taher Ben Jalloun's “This Blinding Absence of Light”

Tahar Ben Jelloun's novels are distinguished by their integration of problematic social phenomena into a purely literary form. While this isn't unique to Ben Jelloun's writing style, the author's way of crafting thought-provoking and often revolutionary experimental stories from the material of traditional Moroccan life is, at least in a way extraordinary: his characters experience social difficulties and embarrassments in their lives through the metaphor of a fictional existence of their self-perception. Thus, for example, their search for identity in their social context manifests in their search for self-perception as fictional characters and power struggles in relationships. Their relationship takes the form of a battle for control of the story. Political prisoners associate writing with their quest for freedom. This article therefore focuses on the torture, body and voice representations of Taher Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light (2002). Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory will be used to approach the psychological disintegration of characters in the text following such a Dark Decade experience and will borrow eclectic concepts from interdisciplinary studies; Erving's concept of Goffman's "holistic institution", Elaine Scarry's comprehensive and detailed theoretical definition and analysis of torture, and Judith Herman's study of trauma.

Meditations on the Female Chronic Pain Experience in Literature: An Exploration of Lupus in Flannery O’Connor’s Letters

“Men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives,” claims Leslie Jamison while citing evidence from the 2001 study The Girl Who Cried Pain (Jamison 117). Pain as an experiential category is different from other somatic experiences, in that it is heavily dependent not only on its mitigation but also on its avowal of external perceptual forces. As Elaine Scarry puts it “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (Scarry 7). This is true except in circumstances when one is inflicting pain on another – such as torture, where the other’s articulation of pain reinforces the effectiveness of pain being inflicted. 
 A close look at the existing theoretical apparatus and literary representations of women’s physical pain reveals a big issue. Even when gender is acknowledged as a contributing factor in women’s pain, these conversations are often limited to representations of descriptions of sexual assault, childbirth and, fairly recently, menstruation.
 The experiences of female pain that aren’t solely mediated through the genitalia, lack both representation and a theoretical vocabulary to talk about them productively. My engagement with pain as a symptom of lupus shows that there are experiences of pain heavily dependent on gender identity, which have nothing to do with the genitalia. In establishing a theoretical apparatus for talking about such experiences it might be useful to draw on Flannery O’Connor’s letters as a test for the theoretical apparatus thus developed.

American Agony: Richard Wright’s Language of Pain inBlack Boy (American Hunger)

This article examines Richard Wright’s description of bodily pain in his autobiographical book Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945). In the last few decades, there has been an ongoing debate about both the nature of physical pain and, in turn, its relationship to language. After the publication of Elaine Scarry’s monumental The Body in Pain (1987), in which the argument is made that physical suffering is “language-destroying,” there has been a burgeoning of research that has challenged this claim by tracing the dynamic relationship between the experience of pain and the social institutions, cultures, and languages that influence our perceptions of it. This article analyses the way in which Richard Wright’s text situates the first-hand qualia of hunger-pains (along with other forms of somatic anguish) within the broader social setting of anti-Black racism and violence during America’s Jim Crow era to, in turn, offer a representation of bodily agony that entwines it with the psycholinguistic dimensions of consciousness. Instead of depicting physical pain in terms of what Patrick Wall calls “a rigid, simple signaling system,” Wright collapses the dichotomy between psychological torment and corporeal distress to offer a nuanced portrayal of pain that entwines its moment-to-moment sensations with the psychological process of navigating America’s cultural matrix of anti-Black dehumanization, poverty, and hostility. As a result, Black Boy serves as a valuable example of the way in which creative storytelling can represent the culturally codified structures of feeling that shape even the most private forms of bodily hurt.

The Pain of Residential Schools in Canada: An Analysis of Silence and Narrative.

In operation for over a century, the Indian Residential School system is a painful part of Canadian history. Through the theoretical approaches to pain envisioned by Elaine Scarry, Javier Moscoso, and Ilit Ferber, this article examines how the pain of residential school experiences manifests as silence among residential school survivors. Through a close analysis of narratives that break free from that silence, it becomes apparent that narrative offers one path to national reconciliation. While arguing in favor of narrative as a path towards national reconciliation, this article cautions readers against reducing residential school narratives to a form of trauma spectatorship.

Female Subjectivity and Body Politics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Zikora

This paper examines the pregnant female body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Zikora. The protagonist's experiences of loneliness, abandonment and struggle during her pregnancy are situated within diverse socio-political relations, including patriarchy, sexuality, immigrant status, romance, transnational background and generation gaps. Drawing on critical insights from body politics, especially Elaine Scarry's concept of conscious body, Michel Foucault's notion of body discipline and Elizabeth Grosz's phenomenological reading of lived bodies, the analysis explores how the protagonist Adichie challenges the traditional understanding of the female body as a mere biological object. The paper argues that through her bodily experiences, the protagonist gains agency to critique and reassess gender relations and stereotypes. The journey of self-discovery and subjectivity emerges as the protagonist's aching body becomes a window to perceive existing relationships and meanings, resulting in a revitalized understanding of her own body and its significance.

The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard's Drama

Abstract: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995), the playwright Tom Stoppard poses existential questions about the inevitability of both cosmic and individual disintegration and death. However, as characters from Arcadia and Indian Ink engage in romantic encounters and acts of aesthetic creation driven by desire, they interrupt the cyclical inevitability of death embodied in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , and they oppose entropic disintegration by instigating encounters with beauty and desire that lead to reconciliation over time. This generative impulse of love and desire parallels Elaine Scarry's assertion in On Beauty and Being Just that encounters with beauty and desire are fundamentally life-giving.

The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard's Drama

Abstract: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Arcadia (1993), and Indian Ink (1995), the playwright Tom Stoppard poses existential questions about the inevitability of both cosmic and individual disintegration and death. However, as characters from Arcadia and Indian Ink engage in romantic encounters and acts of aesthetic creation driven by desire, they interrupt the cyclical inevitability of death embodied in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead , and they oppose entropic disintegration by instigating encounters with beauty and desire that lead to reconciliation over time. This generative impulse of love and desire parallels Elaine Scarry's assertion in On Beauty and Being Just that encounters with beauty and desire are fundamentally life-giving.

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

The Deadly Pestilence: Pain and Mourning in L.M. Montgomery’s Pandemic Life Writing

Montgomery’s life writing from December 1918 to May 1919 reveals a shift from the public anxiety of war to the private pain and grief of a pandemic. The author’s focus on her personal experience with influenza demonstrates what Elaine Scarry posits is pain’s “unsharability,” while her narrative construction of grief represents a Freudian “work of mourning.”

The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale

Reviewed by: The Novel and the New Ethics by Dorothy J. Hale Jesse Rosenthal HALE, DOROTHY J. The Novel and the New Ethics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 360 pp. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 softcover. Novel theory is well past the point where declaring an “ethical turn” would raise many eyebrows. The last two decades or so have proven particularly accommodating to critics who wish to assert the presence of some variation of ethical thought in the formal working of the traditional novel. Part of the compromise of the turn back to ethics has lain in stressing the formal nature of it all: as if to say, we’re not just looking at old-fashioned morals or narratorial lectures. What makes Dorothy J. Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics different is that its analysis does assume design and intention from the start. Looking specifically at novelists who are directly concerned with the academic study of literature—Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and J. M. Coetzee, among others— Hale short-circuits the divide between literary production and analysis. In the works of her authors she locates a set of varied ethical projects that share an awareness of the poststructuralist critique of the individual subject. These critiques, and the related attack on a hoary novelistic ethics based around a stable central subject, succeed for Hale in producing a “new ethics”—one which takes the central human subject not as a given, but as a question. This new ethics moves away from one based on coherent subjectivity: the experiences of other intelligences and points of view. In place of this by-now familiar alterity, it finds instead more modern forms, which include experiences outside of the human: “the lives of animals, states of divinity, or even the nature of fiction” (6). The Novel and the New Ethics continues the project of Hale’s extraordinary 1998 Social Formalism, which charted the ethical stakes of novel form from Henry James through poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and race theory. The argument of that book— one which seems to be every bit as indisputable as it was twenty-five years ago—was that the Jamesian model of novel theory, centered around the figure of the author, cast such a large and inescapable shadow that it would be felt in criticism for a century to come. And in spite of the novelty of the ethical approaches The Novel and the New Ethics describes, it quickly becomes clear that the point of departure has not changed. As Hale puts it, “The novelist who most inspires and authorizes this tradition within the Anglo-American context is Henry James” (25). So we are still looking at the same strong influence, and, just as in Social Formalism, this influence persists whether or not we know it: [E]ven if no one thinks they give a damn about what Henry James knew, the modern novel that James helped to invent and the tradition of novel theory that he inaugurated provide a foundational aesthetics for the novel that underlies [both ethics of alterity and] the poststructuralist new ethical theory that has [End Page 450] developed in the attempt to articulate the positive social value of literature for our postmodern age. (181) In this way, Hale’s work extends her previous argument about the Jamesian tradition into a twenty-first century that might seem to have little to do with him. Where this book parts company with Social Formalism, though, is in its shift of focus from the history of academic novel theory to what Hale refers to as “novelist-critics”: modern novelists who are in explicit conversation with academic criticism (89). Foremost among these are Morrison, Smith, and Coetzee. Though Hale is interested in the intersection between theory and practice in these authors, it often seems that theory is dominant. When she discusses Morrison, she does so in the context of Morrison’s writing on James and William Faulkner; when she turns to Smith, it is in her invocation of Elaine Scarry; and in writing on Coetzee, an academic himself, she focuses on his Elizabeth Costello—a novel that draws centrally on a novelist’s relation with academia. The Novel and the New Ethics...

Being single, being ‘wrong’: pain and the remaking of gendered subjectivity in Delhi

This paper seeks to examine the role of social pain in the unmaking and remaking of urban subjectivities in a context of cultural change. I argue that doubt and uncertainty generated by shifting cultural boundaries underpins a drive to reassert extant social order, including gendered expectations, generating pain in the unmaking of subjectivities for those who are different or ‘other’. In the case of this study, the different are single, middle-aged, women in Delhi, standing outside normative familial structures and forced to answer the question ‘what’s wrong with you?’. However, everyday practices of repair and ‘swallowing’ pain could also work to remake a sense of self. Demonstrating invention as well as the politics of pain in their reclamations of space, these ‘wrong’ women reconfigured subjectivity as a form of cosmopolitanism often defined in opposition to ‘parochial’ others, particularly male migrant workers and cultural nationalists, who are made to lie beyond imagined urbane boundaries. The mirroring of exclusions highlights Elaine Scarry’s work on the incommunicability of pain that results, under conditions of neo-liberal and patriarchal social relations, in both women and working-class men being excluded from city spaces.

The Body in Pain in Isabel Allende’s Tale of Love

Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of bad faith and Elaine Scarry’s view of torture as “suspension of civilization” can be adapted to reveal the symbolic order behind Isabel Allende’s narrative. Love is interwoven with the shadows of the revolution in Chile: the advances in technology, new socialist ideas, the spectre of communism, and above all the right-wing military coup. While men ignore the evidence, the brutality and corruption of the dictatorship bring human beings to a halt. Against passivity and manipulation, Allende, if read through Sartre’s and Scarry’s lenses, indicates the path towards salvation.

The Unethics of Technological Sublimity: The Representation of Environmental Pollution in the Poetry of William Wordsworth

Within a world that is suffering from an escalating climate crisis, literature and literary theory alike are called to arms. Their mission is to alert both readers and scholars to the looming ecological disaster, but also to encourage the invention and active promotion of ethical ways of dealing with the crisis. Assuming an ecological perspective, this paper turns to the Romantic period and the early signs of industrial destruction and discusses William Wordsworth’s ambiguous, volatile stance towards technology. Building on Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, this paper contends that Wordsworth’s early poems represent technology as a sublime object. This portrayal, however, invokes feelings of paralyzing terror, thereby promoting inaction as regards industrialism’s environmental impact. Once technological advancement reaches the Lake District, however, and aesthetic distance is compromised, Wordsworth’s attitude changes, becoming a condemnatory one, moving him to start a campaign against the expansion of the railway. Following Elaine Scarry’s theorization of the link between aesthetics and ethics, it is demonstrated that sublimity constitutes a passive hence unethical way of conceptualizing technology, signalling the need of redefining humankind’s position in and relationship with the rest of the world.

Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker

Reviewed by: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza Michael Jimenez (bio) Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker. Feminist Press, 2020. Pp. 184. Cristina Rivera Garza's book of essays Grieving opens with violence in Mexico against journalists as a context to comprehend global horrors against the bodies of the most vulnerable. In this sense, Garza's book is another study of the horror in recent Mexican history that has led to a deeper analysis of femicide. The subtitle would make Mexico the wounded country. However, Garza does not isolate violence in Mexico but looks at its global connections. She asks: "Can writing keep us company—we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope" (7)? This is a personal question for Garza, who lost her younger sister to domestic violence (8–9). As she comments, "the violence of our contemporary history has never been foreign to me" (72). The rage from this event, in light of the callous indifference and ignorance of elected officials toward our contemporary horrorism, fuels the essays of Garza's book. The forgetfulness toward violence comes with ignoring history. Garza declares: "Awake, history hungrily moves through the city streets or countryside. Sleepless jaws. History reminds us, as always, that we are mortal. That there are things left unresolved" (27). In a short poetic essay, "Horrorism," Garza builds off concrete history to espouse an "ontology of vulnerability" that does not allow [End Page 113] human beings to forget that we are beings-in-relation, charged with caring for one another (98–99). She continues this train of thought about vulnerability in an essay titled "Mourning," featuring the theoretical work of Judith Butler (135–38). The Other person can't help but change us, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, questioning the stability of the individual self in the first place. For example, it is impossible to think that Garza would be the same after losing her sister to violence. Garza points out that this is especially relevant for women's history: "It was a world founded on women's silence. It was a world that required the most intimate silence from women—their demise—to keep functioning" (153). One way to deal with this forced silence is public mourning. The public nature of this event makes us "more vulnerable" and "more human" (138). Garza leans on the classic works on pain and horror by Elaine Scarry and Adriana Cavarero. The fact that these are not new studies reveals that the "frightening grind of femicide" has been around "for decades" (151). However, what differentiates Garza's book from others is the inclusion of literary and historical sources from Latin America. For example, one essay, "Writing in Migration: A Desedimentation with Chilean writer Lina Meruane," features a juxtaposition of Meruane's experience with Garza's (139–46). The comparison begins with both sets of grandparents and their migratory journeys; Meruane's traveled from Palestine to Chile and Garza's from Mexico to the United States. Garza utilizes this idea as a way to discuss how language, both bodily and verbal, carries over to their progeny. This is oftentimes an unconscious inheritance. Both Meruane and Garza physically return to the place of origins and attempt to retrace the steps. The closing section of this chapter has some of the best lines in the book. Here is just a sample: "There is always someone who has migrated before.… There is no tabula rasa. We are just guests on the surface of a land that we experience in common" (146). As in the Meruane chapter, Garza's work continually circles back to Mexico, yet many essays have a global scope. In "Writing against War," Garza links the violence in Mexico with the war in Bosnia, wondering if both stories of violence will ultimately be forgotten (147–50). In addition, Garza references the people disappeared during the Cold War with special focus on the mothers of the disappeared. In short, femicide and the grief that accompany it are a worldwide problem that should not be separated by fictitious borders. On the one hand, what I find compelling about Garza's method...

The Book of Torture: The Gospel of Mark, Crucifixion, and Trauma

AbstractLiterary analysis of texts dealing with the experiences of tortured bodies faces numerous riddles. For example, the urge to be faithful to the victims’ experience hits a wall because of language’s inadequacy to express torment. Another riddle is the urgency to represent the tortured body outside the logic of torture embodied by the torturer. By incorporating some of Elaine Scarry’s insights in The Body in Pain (1988) and paying close attention to the testimonies of those who have survived torture, this article argues that the crucifixion of Jesus in Mark 15 is a case of torture that expands beyond the crucifixion itself and bleeds into other literary topics such as discipleship and the temple.

Announcement

Pain is notoriously tricky. Pain is central to the human condition, but its very nature—at once biological, cultural, and social—slips easily from grasp. Recent events like the murder of George Floyd and, more broadly, the public spectacle of recorded Black pain, the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee crisis, and the opioid crisis have moved problems of pain and its representation to the fore.The moment is ripe to reevaluate pain in literary and cultural studies. Thirty-five years after its publication, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) remains a cornerstone of pain studies, as scholars continue to read the experience of pain through its diptych: pain “unmakes” the world of the subject by destroying language even as it “makes” art and culture from emotional, psychological, and physical suffering. Pain destroys, but it also creates. Pain exhausts as much as it enrages, inflames, and inspires. From narratives of enslavement to sentimental fictions—from tales of labor injuries to stories of war wounds, illness, and chronic suffering—American literature provides a voluminous archive with which to interrogate and reimagine this dialectical model of pain as well as to reflect on the many ways pain is experienced, suffered, inhabited, resisted, and transformed through representation. Building on the more recent work of Rachel Ablow, Cynthia Davis, Justine S. Murison, Margaret Price, Michael D. Snediker, Simon Strick, Keith Wailoo, and Xine Yao, among others, this issue calls for scholars to attend to the complex work of pain in American literature and culture in the wake of Scarry’s critical paradigm and cultural shifts over the past few decades, perhaps reassessing how pain operates at the level of discourse, ideology, subject formation, and collective affiliation, as well as its social, political, and aesthetic forms. How we know pain, how we experience it, and how we understand its nature—that is, questions of epistemology, phenomenology, and ontology—are also ripe for rethinking.We welcome submissions on any period or genre of American literature, but we are particularly interested in the shift from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, when pain became “unacceptable” (Karen Halttunen) and the culture of pain moved from “prayer to pain killers” (Joanna Bourke). We are also especially interested in reconsiderations of the race, gender, ability, sexuality, and class dimensions of pain and its cultural forms.We invite essays that might address any of the following topics: The aesthetics, representations, and genres of painVarieties and intensities of pain and/in the politics of sufferingRace and painGendered pain; pain and sexualityThe global politics of US pain; American figurations of pain in and beyond US bordersAcute or chronic pain; pain and diseasePain and illness; pain beyond/outside of illness; pain and disabilityFeeling/unfeelingPain and the willReligious and/or secular understandings of painPain and memory; pain and public memory/memorializationTechnologies of pain management; pain, drugs, stigmaPain, woundedness, and vulnerabilityPain and the bodymind; pain and personhoodPain and the subject/object; pain and subjectivity/objectivityCommunities of pain; communal or distributed painHuman and nonhuman pain, especially in relation to environmental justiceEpistemologies and ontologies of painSpectacles of pain and pain’s invisibilitySubmissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes and references) should be submitted electronically at mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-aml by September 5, 2022. For assistance with the submission process, please contact the office of American Literature at am-lit@duke.edu or 919-684-3396. For inquiries about the content of the issue, please contact the coeditors: Sari Altschuler (s.altschuler@northeastern.edu) and Thomas Constantinesco (thomas.constantinesco@gmail.com).

‘Concealment of What is Closed’: Western Necrocivilization in David Greig’s Version of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women

UK crises of hospitality, feminism, and democracy are as acute as ever despite ostensible commitment to the values that foster them. This article examines David Greig’s 2016 Edinburgh version of Aeschylus’s Suppliants as it attempts to expand spaces of democracy into the theatre, and investigates the foundations of democratic institutions. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics and Elaine Scarry’s theorization of civilization, it highlights necrocivilizational elements in the production’s premise and reception. It argues that Greig’s presentation of Aeschylus’s play presents a more complex engagement with western democracy, asylum, theatre, and civilization than commentators have acknowledged. Rather than primarily opening up new spaces of negotiation among asylum-seekers and citizens in the community, The Suppliant Women foregrounds the exclusionary discursive tactics operating under the auspices of civilization that leave the logics underpinning the UK’s asylum policy largely untroubled. Sarah Stewart is an independent researcher whose work centres on the relationships forged between asylum-seekers, members of the theatre establishment, and citizen communities within and beyond the performance space. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh.

Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life

In 2009, Mary Cappello published a memoir that bravely, and intimately, focused on her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and “cure.” This prize-winning book has now been rereleased with an afterword by the author. The text is timely, given our national and world focus on health, disease, death, and immortality, sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic.Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry laid out the theoretical underpinnings for Cappello in the late 1970s and 1980s, and physician/writers have long animated American readers, particularly Abraham Verghese and Oliver Sacks. Cappello's book is neither theoretical nor “medical”: she is a forceful writer of nonfiction; she is an extraordinarily insightful reader of literature; she is deeply in love with her partner—she is in love with everything, especially the life that took on renewed meaning after her cancer diagnosis.So this is really a book about love. And gratitude. The author reminds us constantly of her privileged position on the battlefield of cancer—as a professional woman with health insurance, a woman with a supportive family and many friends; and she dedicates the book to the ordinary people who helped her heal: the acupuncturist, the hairdresser, the massage therapist, the physical therapist, all of whom gently guided her recovery. The literature in the text is introduced with skill and calm and without fanfare or pretension. There is a heavy reliance on Proust—the patient brought Swann's Way with her into the operating theater—and reports how, right before surgery, “My anesthesiologist recited lines from Proust that were his favorite” (43).The book is crisp in organization and completely unsentimental. Four sections map the cancer voyage in chronological order. Cappello directs the reader from “Diagnosis” to “Surgery,” “Chemotherapy,” and “Radiation.” Each segment of her specific (but not uncommon in terms of treatment protocol) cancer journey is written as a separate chapter. The final section, the coda, is entitled “Called Back: The Voyage Out,” and the author recounts a simple, moving story of the day she's essentially “released’ from treatment following a clear 2008 mammogram. “You live your life,” instructs Cappello's surgeon, “and leave the monitoring to me” (207). Everyone deserves this level of humane care and attention from a health-care professional.Called Back should find again a wide readership—in this new, updated edition—among women undergoing breast cancer treatment. But anyone facing the uncertainty of a scary diagnosis, multiple surgeries, and treatment with toxic chemicals and radiation will benefit from Cappello's clear-eyed nonfiction narrative. Physicians—to gain added perspective on the fear, courage, and resilience of their patients—might spend some time with this book, which should be required reading for medical students.As of late April 2022, we close in on one million reported deaths in the United States from COVID-19, and it's safe to say that the entire nation has been transfixed and, to some degree, transformed by a deadly pandemic that waxes and wanes. The virus has forced us to rethink, totally, the society we live in. “We read and write,” asserts Cappello, “to interrupt the daily tale we tell ourselves” (125). Her generosity, her truthfulness, and the love that pours from her pages helps all readers imagine and construct a better tale—a more hopeful tale—even in times of great uncertainty.