Somewhere between the diagnosis and the surgery, Jeremiah Healy decided to write an article about his prostate cancer. Healy is better known for writing mystery novels and short stories under his own name and under his pseudonym, Terry Devane. This time the story was his own, as he joined the ranks of writers who seek to connect with their readers by offering up their own personal experience.
“I figured I had two ways to deal with it–stay quiet or talk about it,” Healy says. “For me, writing about the cancer was a way of spitting in its eye and coming through the process with a better understanding of a given disease that had targeted me specifically.”
It helps that Healy feels at ease with topics others might shy away from, a skill he first learned as a trial attorney and law professor, and honed as a writer. His most recent book, A Stain Upon the Robe, deals with clergy sexual abuse. But now his topic was not only difficult but highly personal. If Healy had qualms about being self-revealing, though, he brushed them aside to accomplish what he wanted: to give a gift to other men and the people close to them. Noting that he benefitted from the openness of others about their own experiences, Healy says his article was “also a way to pay back, or to Ôpay it forward”.
“I’ve been very pleased by the response. People have said, ‘I’m glad some guy is finally willing to talk about this, including the questions about incontinence and sexual impotence’.about his prostate cancer. Healy is better known for writing mystery novels and short stories under his own name and under his pseudonym, Terry Devane. This time the story was his own, as he joined the ranks of writers who seek to connect with their readers by offering up their own personal experience.
“I figured I had two ways to deal with it–stay quiet or talk about it,” Healy says. “For me, writing about the cancer was a way of spitting in its eye and coming through the process with a better understanding of a given disease that had targeted me specifically.”
It helps that Healy feels at ease with topics others might shy away from, a skill he first learned as a trial attorney and law professor, and honed as a writer. His most recent book, A Stain Upon the Robe, deals with clergy sexual abuse. But now his topic was not only difficult but highly personal. If Healy had qualms about being self-revealing, though, he brushed them aside to accomplish what he wanted: to give a gift to other men and the people close to them. Noting that he benefitted from the openness of others about their own experiences, Healy says his article was “also a way to pay back, or to Ôpay it forward”.
“I’ve been very pleased by the response. People have said, ‘I’m glad some guy is finally willing to talk about this, including the questions about incontinence and sexual impotence’.”
The article, which can be seen on his web site, www.jeremiahhealy.com, may not be Healy’s last word on the subject.
“Who knows, maybe in the future I’ll give the experience of Jeremiah Healy the human being to a character in a book.”
For a writer, using your own life in your work in an explicit way forces you to walk a line edged with potential missteps. When we write our own personal details into our work the result can be generous and meaningful, or narrow and self-indulgent. The fine edge is one I worried about with my own book, Afterwords, a collection of poems I wrote during my husband’s illness and after his death. Rafael Campo is a physician and a poet who has given a lot of thought to the subject. Campo is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Landscape with Human Figure and a collection of essays, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry.
“This question,” says Campo, “has been a central concern of mine, coming from the medical profession, where we go so far in the opposite direction to shield ourselves in the armor of white coats and machinery and professional objectivity. But I try to push myself as a writer in terms of openness, to make myself more visible. I think there can be damage in too much distance between caregiver and patient, and between writers and readers, too.
Campo shares my concern of trying to figure out how much of ourselves we dare write into our work. He feels the pivotal point lies in motive, in what is driving the writer. If a writer is motivated by self-aggrandizement, Campo says, or is not telling the truth, it violates the contract between writer and reader. On the other hand, he says, there is much to be gained when a writer shares his or her own experience.
“Both writer and reader can recognize themselves in each other’s eyes. It allows the narrator to do the real work of narration, to show what we share as human beings.”