No Cure for Being Human

Kate Bowler is thirty-five when doctors diagnose her with stage IV colon cancer. Immunotherapy works for her, and she is left with a strange new task: building a life in the gaps between CT scans.

Before the illness, she had taken on the very American assumption that life offers an endless horizon of possibilities. Now she has to decide what to do within the limits of whatever time remains. This is a memoir, and non-fiction in the plainest sense: she reports on her own attempts to find meaning rather than offering a cure or a formula.

The chapters work through anecdotes that run from the absurd to the painfully sad. In one, she tries to clear a hospital gift shop of its copies of a prosperity gospel book by Joel Osteen. Elsewhere she slices her days into efficient segments, tries to stay in the moment, weighs what work is worth, and tries to learn what "enough" feels like.

The question underneath is how anyone makes meaning while the clock runs. The tone mixes dark comedy with grief, and the book suits readers who want honest reflection on mortality, ambition and time, and who are comfortable with a Christian perspective in the telling.