No Cure for Being Human

Kate Bowler was a young historian at Duke, married with a small son and studying the American belief that the right faith and enough effort will produce a good life, when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer at 35. No Cure for Being Human is her account of living inside a terminal diagnosis while a whole culture insists on relentless positivity. She writes about the strange economy of hope offered by the wellness industry, the well-meaning friends who arrive with advice, and the daily work of loving her family without the guarantee of a future. Bowler moves between memoir and cultural criticism, pulling apart the idea that anyone can out-plan or out-perform their own mortality, and settling instead into a hard-won acceptance of limits.