“No Cure for Being Human” by Kate Bowler

What's the best way to describe where you are on the arc of your life? Age is simply a measure of days alive. How about whether you are still bending toward bounty or slipping into scarcity? 

Kate Bowler knows how inadequate language can be in those places. She confides in her new book, “I am incurable. I have a durable illness.” That sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? Incurable, meaning she will likely die of this illness. And durable, meaning she is enduring it, resisting its claim on her.

And that’s the wonder of this new memoir. Somehow Bowler finds a way to put words to the deepest contradictions of a full life albeit a shortened one.

Diagnosed in her mid-30s with advanced colon cancer, she and her husband had just had a son, her career was flourishing at Duke University and she was about to publish a book about the prosperity gospel. When the tests on the cancer came back, the numbers were brutal. Pressed for a prediction, one doctor told Bowler she had a 14 percent chance of living long enough to see her son start school.

But here she is. Experimental treatments have worked, months and then years have passed and she concedes that the blazing sense of purpose to just survive has waned. 

In the memoir, she wonders what to do with a wonderfully ordinary life.

“We live and we are loved and we are gone,” she concludes.

On Friday, Nov. 26, catch my interview with her on the new book and her life story.