On first being given a possible cancer diagnosis by his radiologist, Peter Goldsworthy says it’s as though he’s “on the other end of the telling, for once” but “simultaneously standing aside, watching from an ironic distance”.
Memoir is a self-conscious, reflexive mode by definition but, in The Cancer Finishing School, this feels doubly true. As a “doctor-writer”, Goldsworthy is both physician and patient; observer and observed, all at once. The result is a very personal story told with remarkable objectivity. Part of the treatment for his eventual diagnosis of myeloma involves an autologous stem cell transplant, whereby healthy cells are collected from a donor’s blood or bone marrow, stored, and later returned to them after treatment. This feels like an apt metaphor for the project of this book: Goldsworthy harvests the marrow of his own experience, transplanting it to the page so that it might be put to good use and given new life.
As an accomplished novelist, poet, essayist and librettist, Goldsworthy is alert to the narrative and linguistic possibilities of his illness. Cancer stories are “serial edge-of-the-seat cliffhangers” filled with “surprising plot twists”. He approaches his predicament as one might analyse a literary work, pointing out various coincidences and instances of cosmic irony. Watching the machine harvesting his stem cells, he brings to mind various agrarian metaphors and wonders whether his grandchildren might be the first generation for whom such imagery has little meaning.
Alongside this literary sensibility, Goldsworthy’s extensive medical career illuminates his story. His prose is suffused with dark humour, which is “as much a part of the language of our tribe as Latin and Greek”. In one passage, he relates taking precautions with his patients by screening for infectious illnesses: “Heart attacks are welcome,” he reassures them. “Chainsaw an arm off, bring it along in an esky. Cancer, of course. How could I say no? Just don’t come with the sniffles, or gastro.”
He braids his own journey with the stories of his patients – living and dead – who are presented as part of his consciousness, “coughed up … in vivid present-tense immediacy” as he lies in bed. Earlier in his career, he confesses, he always had “one ear cocked for any useful material” but has come to learn that “proper listening” is a “portal into another world, another perceptual dimension”. Herein lies his ultimate fascination: he doesn’t shy away from the physical reality of cancer but it’s subjective consciousness – not only his but every individual’s – which he deems the ultimate miracle. The vagaries and acrobatics of Goldsworthy’s mind, his deep curiosity, his magical thinking, his wonder, his regret … it’s all here on the page in rich and compelling detail.
Goldsworthy is wary of the “narcissism” of illness: “Does the world need yet another book about cancer?… is there anything new to report?” While his experience might be “unspecial”, his prose is endlessly idiosyncratic, playful and inventive. Back on his bike, his “lighter-than-air aluminium machine” is “back where it belongs anatomically, half of the whole me, a boy-headed centaur of metal and flesh”. Tropes of cancer, such as the hair loss associated with chemotherapy, will be familiar to many readers but here they’re rendered in original terms. Shaving his head so as to regain some control, he quips: “To paraphrase former PM John Howard, I will decide when the hairs emigrate from my head, and the circumstances under which they do so.”
Ultimately, the “lessons” of his illness are commonplace. He is more “open to the world” and has a renewed sense of gratitude: “The pillowed head that I wake beside each morning has never seemed more dear.” For him, cancer has been a “blessing” and a “gift”. Such realisations might be cliched (he even writes that “battle” may actually be a fitting word to describe the experience of cancer) but Goldsworthy is fully cognisant of this fact. His lessons – about love, family and connection – are “nothing more than a handful of useful, if not particularly original platitudes that I should have known all along”. This is the strength of Goldsworthy’s memoir: he doesn’t insist on his own uniqueness but offers himself as a vessel to examine something more universal.
The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy is published by Penguin ($36.99)
