Simon Sahner on How Men and Women Write About Illness  Journal or Review?

Why do men with cancer tend to document their suffering for the public almost immediately, while women are more likely to turn to writing only after overcoming an illness? Simon Sahner examines this phenomenon and the social conditions that shape it.

A few years after completing my cancer treatment, I began writing about my illness. This was a period when my follow-up appointments were becoming less frequent, and something struck me. I was reading numerous personal accounts of illness for my research, and at some point I noticed that every man who had written about his condition had ultimately died from it – having documented it only during the acute phase. I found very few accounts by men who had survived.

Women, on the other hand, usually only began writing after their treatment had ended – when they were well again, or at least no longer in acute care. Although the pattern I observed was based on only a small number of cases and might be challenged by other examples, the consistency of it nevertheless struck me.

Surviving Breast Cancer

When women write about cancer, it is typically about tumours affecting the breast or primary sex characteristics – the parts of the body socially coded as female. This is likely due in large part to the fact that younger women now increasingly survive these cancers and are therefore able to write about them afterwards. For many of these women, writing also serves as a way to engage publicly with the societal and normative perspectives on womanhood, and to examine their own sense of self. “If few diseases[SP1]  are as calamitous to women in effects as breast cancer, there are even fewer as voluminous in their agonies,” notes Anne Boyer. When women write about this disease, it is therefore often an act of testimony and a demonstration of survival. Audre Lorde, who initially survived a cancer diagnosis, insists that concealing the impact of illness and survival would mean denying that something happened – that she, as a person, went through something that changed her.

There are strikingly few journals from women with cancer who recount the illness as it happens. Even Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals begins six months after her mastectomy. It seems likely that the societal expectation that women continue to perform caregiving roles, even while ill, drains them of the energy and capacity men in the same situation are more able to devote to writing. As Audre Lorde notes, women filled out the medical forms for sick men and children, while sick women completed their own.

Fighting the Enemy Within

The situation is quite different for many men processing their experience of cancer. It is almost as if they treat their writing like field reports – records from hours of solitude, defined by treatment, anxiety and despair, often taking the form of journals. One might even describe them as dispatches from a campaign against the enemy within their own bodies. Their texts sometimes read like an act of resistance against vanishing into the certainty of the end. Wolfgang Herrndorf claimed he would not have kept a diary had he been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Only a brain tumour – specifically a glioblastoma, which he referred to as “the Rolls-Royce of illnesses” – carried sufficient gravity to warrant such sustained documentation of the illness and its impacts. When men write about their cancer, it is often a direct confrontation with the conditio humana – concerned with the larger picture, with the self in relation to existence.

We should be careful not to read too much into the observation that men tend to write about illness in the midst of it, while women more often reflect retrospectively – but it is nonetheless a telling sign that social circumstances shape not only how, but also in what form, individuals express their own experiences of illness.

March 2026