Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as the people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, the author recounts a collection of illness stories.
Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. This title offers both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. It uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life better, and when do they endanger it?