‘The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer’ with Mike Marqusee

Mike Marqusee will discuss his new book which explores the personal, social and political dimensions of cancer.

BOOK TALK

‘The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer’
with Mike Marqusee

Wednesday July 2nd, 7pm

Entry £3, redeemable against any purchase

Writer and activist Mike Marqusee will be discussing his new book ‘The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer’ (OR Books, 2014), which explores the personal, social and political dimensions of an illness that will affect one in three people in the course of their lives.

Marqusee was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, in the summer of 2007. At first, disinclined to share his misery with others, he was reluctant to write about his illness. But he then came to realize that doing so provided a precious continuity with his life as a writer before contracting the disease, and a way of reaching out to a wider world that the illness made physically less accessible. Writing allowed him to address what he saw as a variety of insidious platitudes that surround cancer, often connected to the individualistic idea that the sufferer must be brave in battling the disease, with the inevitable corollary that those who succumb have, in some measure, brought it on themselves.

And so he began to write about his illness. Not just his own symptoms and feelings, but the responses of friends to the news that he is ill and the way these reflect broader social attitudes towards the sick. He describes the political struggles occurring in St Bartholomew’s, the London hospital that cares for him, and the crisis in Britain’s National Health Service more generally, at a time of harrowing cutbacks. Big Pharma, whose drugs keep Marqusee alive but are sold to the NHS at prices reflecting the power and greed of a ruthless extortionist, is the subject for particularly astringent scrutiny.

Mike Marqusee is an American-born writer, journalist and political activist who has lived in Britain since 1971. He is the author of numerous books including If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the Sixties, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket, a novel, Slow Turn, and a collection of poetry, Street Music. He is a regular correspondent for a range of publications including The Guardian, Red Pepper and The Hindu.

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