The Myth of Normal 95

individual movie frames projected at rapid speed create the optical illusion of a single, continuous narrative. For most of us it may require a crisis of some kind before we question the veracity and solidity of the self-concept we act from, before it even occurs to us that it might conceal something truer about us. Such crises might take the form of some relational catastrophe such as a divorce or near divorce; a debilitating addiction that disrupts our functioning, such that we can no longer ignore or tolerate it; the midlife bewilderment that may befog our forties or fifties; a sudden depression that ensnares us as we go along what we thought was our merry way; or a medical affliction, such as Anita Moorjani endured. All these can—and often seem uncannily as if they were designed to—point toward the need for a fundamental reassessment of who we think we are. Strikingly, in her private musings Susan Sontag unwittingly pinpointed the emotional dynamics for which her cancer stood as a perfect metaphor. “I’m being wasted by self-pity and self-contempt,” she wrote in her journal.[11] Cancer, of course, is a wasting disease—it devastates the body from the inside. She also located the source of her self-loathing in her anguished childhood. “Everyone who has had a bad childhood is angry. I must have felt angry at first (early). Then I ‘did’ something with it. Turned it into—what? Self-hatred.” Eerily, Sontag touched upon the forbidden link just after her original diagnosis with breast cancer in 1971—some eight years before she wrote “Illness as Metaphor.” “The first thing I thought was: What did I do to deserve this? I’ve led the wrong life, I’ve been too repressed.” The word “wrong” there is a delicate thing, of course, resting very much on the spirit in which it is used. Sontag did not lead an incorrect life—that would be a harsh and blaming view—but neither, the word implies, did she get to live the life she might have wanted for herself. Rereading “Illness as Metaphor” now, knowing what I know, I am saddened. Sontag spurned the connection between emotion, personality, and illness more forcefully and articulately than anyone—and, too, with bitter and unintended irony. The life and death of this powerful thinker, etched with tragedy, has much to tell us