Abstract

This piece returns to the writer’s memoir essays about her mother’s chronic lung disease to examine the relationship between the act of caregiving and the act of writing. In arguing for important differences between the clinical, healing imperatives of narrative medicine and the primacy for the writer of self-reflection, personal need and career, the essay demonstrates how writing remains in many ways at odds with the obligations and the hopes of caregiving. At the same time, the essay argues that writing her mother’s stories of illness holds the potential for both honor and mutuality—and can, in fact, constitute a form of caregiving.