The Myth of Normal 74

Chapter 6 It Ain’t a Thing: Disease as Process Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars. A lifetime study of the internal-combustion engine would not help anyone to understand our traffic problems . . . A traffic jam is due to a failure of the normal relationship between driven cars and their environment and can occur whether they themselves are running normally or not. —Sir David Smithers, Lancet, 1962 V, formerly known as Eve Ensler,[*] rose to fame in the 1990s as the author of the Vagina Monologues, the play the New York Times called “probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade.” Her blockbuster stage success has given rise to a life of activism. A fearless advocate for and defender of women’s rights, she has traveled worldwide, witnessing the bloody aftermath of mass rape and misogynist brutality in Bosnia and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. The political is personal for V. In her heartrending yet triumphant memoir of surviving life-threatening stage IV uterine cancer, In the Body of the World, she poses a question of stunning frankness and insight: “Do I have rape cancer?” From an early age and over many years, her father sexually violated her—a chronic assault on which was superimposed severe emotional abuse and, later, terrifying physical violence. All the while, her mother, hobbled by the legacy of her own childhood suffering, remained oblivious and/or silent. The child Eve felt she was “betraying” her mom by having an affair with her own father. “As a child when your father incests you, you feel you were the betrayer,” she told me in an online interview. “And my mother hated me for it. She hated me for how much he adored me.” Toxic self-blame