No Cure for Being Human
(And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
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4.3 • 95 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn’t choose?
“Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.”—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed
It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?
Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age thirty-five, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born.
With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s no cure for being human.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This heartfelt memoir answers the question: What do we do when life takes a surprise turn for the worse? In her earlier book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, author and divinity professor Kate Bowler discussed being diagnosed with colon cancer. In this powerful follow-up, she gets honest about navigating the rest of her life while not knowing how long it will last. Bowler’s stark emotional honesty is awe-inspiring. It’s incredibly moving to follow Bowler as she begins to come to terms with having her own mortality go from a nebulous, abstract concept to something painfully real and close. She never loses perspective throughout the twists and turns in her medical journey—and we laughed and cried right along with her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In heartbreaking essays, Bowler (Everything Happens for a Reason) recounts lessons learned after being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at the age of 35. An associate professor at Duke Divinity School, she thought that everyone had limitless choices before receiving the grim diagnosis that pegged her survival odds at 14%: "Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered, or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present." While mourning the loss of a future with her husband and two-year-old son, Bowler enrolled in a clinical trial for a new immunotherapy drug, and, miraculously, was one of 3% of patients to successfully respond to it. After searching her whole life for a "formula for how to live," she writes, "cancer treatment had provided the clearest one of all." Bowler's strong faith is present throughout, though the writing, refreshingly, never feels overtly religious. More than anything, her convictions underscore the importance of living life on one's own terms. "Someday... God will draw us into the eternal moment where there will be no suffering," she writes. "In the meantime, we are stuck with our beautiful, terrible finitude." Those in need of a wake-up call will find it in this breathtaking narrative.
