The Cure for Being Human reads less like a book written for the public and more like a private journal released into the world. At its core, it documents, the author - Kate Bowler’s cancer diagnosis, immunotherapies, and confrontation with mortality, alongside a deep internal struggle with faith, meaning, and belief in the face of suffering.
The questions raised are old ones, heavy with history: Why does suffering exist? What happens to belief when the body fails and certainty dissolves? Where is the balance between faith and toxic positivity? Is the bucket list problematic? These are not posed from a place of theological distance, but from inside fear, pain, and uncertainty.
Being sick has a way of narrowing the world. It strips away assumptions of control and reminds us how fragile we are, how little power we actually hold, and how quickly everything familiar can disappear. In that sense, the book is honest. It captures the disorientation that comes when life is interrupted by illness and the future is no longer assumed.
And yet, that honesty is also where the book falters for me. Maybe it is because I have worked in a trauma 1 center and burn unit and I am desensitized to a certain extend to some of her anecdotes.The writing feels unprocessed and unresolved, as though the reader is being asked to witness a private reckoning rather than engage with a work shaped for understanding. The reflections remain inward, circling pain without fully transforming it. At times, it feels like reading someone’s personal journal, not a story that has been prepared to meet others where they are.
The book inevitably brings to mind When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, which I found far more compelling. Written in the shadow of terminal illness and released after his death, Dr Kalanithi’s work carries a sense of intention and clarity. It does not merely record suffering; it wrestles with it, shaping grief, fear, and mortality into something that offers the reader steadiness and perspective. Where The Cure for Being Human documents a crisis, When Breath Becomes Air illuminates it.
As of this writing, the author of The Cure for Being Human has announced that she is cancer free, praise God. That context matters. Survival inevitably alters how a story is told and received. Still, the book feels like a deeply personal account that may have been better left private - in her journal, meaningful first and foremost to the one who lived it.
Perhaps the book was released too quickly. In a world where nearly everything is monetized, there is often pressure to turn experience into product without allowing it the time it needs to settle. This book may have benefited from stillness, from pause, particularly on the other side of recovery. Distance might have allowed for greater clarity and a more deliberate articulation of what that journey truly meant.
For readers seeking a book that helps them sit with mortality, suffering, and what it means to be human, I would recommend When Breath Becomes Air over The Cure for Being Human.
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