This article confronts two acclaimed cancerographies dealing with breast cancer, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Krystyna Kofta’s Lewa, wspomnienie prawej [The Left, Recollections of the Right]. The former was published in the 1980s in the United States; the latter, which contains sections from the writer’s diary written in 2002, was published the following year in Poland. Each memoir belongs to a different time and a socio- historical context; yet by discounting all the differences the article tries to identify the core pathographic readings, which are assumed to function primarily as social facts. Finally, the article argues the American critical and sociological understanding of the illness narrative is not always compatible with Polish cultural codes and conventions, and may lead to a misreading of Polish texts in that category.

In her book L’usage de la photo, published in France in 2005, Annie Ernaux creates an inimitable personal narration to describe her experience of living with breast cancer. The book matches photographs of things that belonged to her and her partner as they were scattered all over the place the previous day with passages chronicling of the progress of her illness and the way it invades her daily life. The article argues that the experimental form enabled the author of L’usage de la photo to find a new perspective on her record of the female experience of cancer. The article analyzes both the photo-graphic parts of the narration, which, it seems, foreshadow the nearness of death, and the literary/autobiographical parts, which contain a frank record of living with cancer.