Ghost Stories: A Memoir of Love & Grief with SIRI HUSTVEDT

it's awkward to ask about but you say about not that one causes the other but in individuals who are sensitive you know the emotional weight of that whether it can

cause a decline or of course well I mean this is as I point out in the book it's scientifically unproven but we do know that at some point, especially with a malignant tumor, the immune system ceases to recognize it.

And so the immune system does play a very important role in cancer.

And for centuries, physicians have linked cancer to powerful emotions.

And in fact, even in the contemporary literature, it remains true.

Exactly how it happens, of course, is mysterious, just as there's no cure for cancer.

Many cancer treatments fail, although more and more are successful.

But the model in Western medicine, which is the biomedical model, has a tendency to ignore the social circumstances and personal histories of the patients.

And I point that out.

No doctor asked Paul about his recent experience.

And I do think it played a role.

Saying that it played a role, I mean, the man smoked for many years, and we know that lung cancer is strongly correlated with smoking.

Obviously, this was not the single cause of his illness.

Nevertheless, I'm convinced, not only because of my experience with Paul, but in my general reading, that questions of a person's life play a significant role in illness too.

Yeah, and I'm wondering, it's definitely, it's just something you can't quantify, but it's all these things.

I mean, we're so obsessed with data points

now,

but we talked

about this at the beginning before the discussion, but

so much of the real life, like what you're writing about in this book, so much of those mysterious spaces, so much of what animates us and makes us individuals, that's all those spaces in between.

You talk about it, the betweenness.

It's what

bathes ourselves.

Yes, that's the escape category.

the escape category.