"To this eloquent study, Kathlyn Conway brings abundant qualifications. A survivor of three bouts of cancer, each requiring arduous treatment (and about which she has written a memoir), Conway is also a practicing psychotherapist and an acute reader of medical memoirs. Beyond Words: Illness and the limits of expression treats a number of memoirs as essentially one book, not out of laziness but out of a sharp sense of the common challenges faced by anyone who tries to write honestly about their illness. Accordingly, the book anatomizes such major hurdles as character, plot, language, narrative form, and endings. To Conway's other talents one should add that she is a fine literary critic."—Times Literary Supplement