Anne Boyer points out how the healthcare system succeeds in both failing and over-medicalizing breast cancer patients — or even those without breast cancer who are misled to believe erroneous diagnoses. When it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of African American women with triple negative breast cancer, for example, Boyer notes that individuals within that demographic are less likely to be diagnosed but more likely to die from the illness. Boyer also contributes her unique perspective as a single mother, noting that “it should be no surprise that single women with breast cancer, even adjusting for age, race, and income, die of it at up to twice the rate of the married. The death rate gets higher if you are single and poor.” The system in particular lets down populations that are already underserved. 

The injustice of this institutionalized neglect is exacerbated by the expectations placed by popular culture on survivors and those presently affected by the illness. Cancer survivors are expected to tout an almost iconic appearance, and literature on survivors is most prized when it is not written by the survivor themself, but rather about an Other — “always about the sister, wife, or mother-in-law, all of the dying women with a bald head and none of them with a voice.” Literature written by the person experiencing the pain itself is less palatable than when sourced from observers experiencing the illness second-hand. And, as Boyer sharply notes, “women’s suffering is generalized into literary opportunity,” an act of exploitation rendered inaccessible to those actually experiencing the suffering. The form of a memoir brings this exclusion of the affected individuals out into the open, for within a memoir form there exists no narrative of the illness without the author themself — “I” and “cancer” become inextricable, and as such, the injustice done to patients robbed of their voice and mistreated by the system enter the spotlight. Only when such a usable platform is made available for those already exhausted by the war with the illness itself can social change come about. Part of the reparations for the wrongs inflicted upon women by the healthcare system, as well as the sensationalization of the archetypal illness by the mainstream, starts with allowing those affected by breast cancer to have a voice to expound upon the experience in totality — not only the aspects that can be marketed and capitalized upon in advantageous ways. Restoring this agency necessitates providing affected individuals with the option to choose and deliberate upon “what is written about it, or not written about it, or whether or not to write about it, or how,” essentially carving out a space to  answer the “disordering question of form.”