Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person Sparknotes

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Whimsical Critique on Cancer Narrative Miriam’s Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir In Comics provides a critique on cultural and stereotypical attitudes towards breast cancer. At age 43, Miriam Engelberg was first diagnosed with breast cancer and she began to reflect on her experience with cancer in her memoir as a coping mechanism tool to find comfort while dealing with the trauma. The graphic memoir illustrates Engelberg’s day-to-day struggles with the disease while also challenging the conventional narrative “cancer has made me a stronger/better person.” The novel depicts to the reader how she chooses to follow the path of “shallowness” instead of becoming a “deeper” and spiritual

The author juxtaposes her reality (“the path of shallowness”) with conventional ideas of “survivorship,” “nobility,” and “spirituality.” She also incorporates irony and humor to not only mock the master narrative, but also to detach herself from the harsh reality. Engelberg began to create the cartoons for this graphic novel to cope with the hardship, in addition to looking “for pop culture” (Engelberg xvii) rather than going “inward” (xvii). Emily Waples stated in her article “. "Avatars, Illness, and Authority: Embodied experience in breast cancer autopathographics." how “Engelberg’s sketched aesthetic not only suggests the makeshift, chaotic, and haphazard nature of her experience with cancer, but it lends a kind of iconicity to her drawings; her “pictorial embodiment” accordingly works to construct identification with her readership” (Waples 177). That is to say, her simplistic sketches allowed for relatableness for the audience and invited other cancer patients to follow the alternative path. Nonetheless, Engelberg recognizes that her approach is difficult and it implies an extensive amount of limitations that are not always portrayed in the main cancer

Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics. 1st edition. HarperCollin Books, 2006. New York, NY.

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Miller, Nancy K. "The trauma of diagnosis: Picturing cancer in graphic memoir." Configurations 22, vol. 2, 2014, pp. 207-223. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/con.2014.0018.

Phelan, James. "Irony, ethics, and lyric narrative in Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer made me a shallower person." The Oxford handbook of comic book studies, 2020, pp. 311-318. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies - Google Books.

Segal, Judy Z. “Breast Cancer Narratives as Public Rhetoric: Genre Itself and the Maintenance of Ignorance.” Linguistics & the Human Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1, Apr. 2007, pp. 3–23. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v3i1.3.

Waples, Emily. "Avatars, Illness, and Authority: Embodied experience in breast cancer autopathographics." Configurations 22, vol. 2, 2014, pp. 153-181.