"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

“Kathlyn Conway opens primordial questions about the shattering events of illness through close readings of selected illness narratives, proposing that only writing of a daring kind can utter the knowledge of the self-telling body. Wielding her ferocious intellect and braving exposure to self and other, Conway makes original discoveries about writing and illness and, more stunningly, about writing and life. Not a book about illness, this is a book about writing and being. It is taut, brave, unequalled in our scholarship, and true. Conway joins our most powerful investigators of the human predicament of mortality, helping us to see, helping us to live.”

– Rita Charon, Columbia University, Program in Narrative Medicine