Author Ana María Shua Chronicles Her Cancer Journey in New Short Story Collection

Ana María Shua (Buenos Aires, 1951) is a global authority in two often overlooked literary forms: the short story and the micro-story. Her latest book, 'The Broken Body' (Páginas de espuma), brings her on tour in Spain, featuring a selection of stories about illness, doctors, and caregivers, including at least two highly autobiographical tales. Reality is chaotic and incomprehensible, but stories, she argues, are small universes that help us make sense of it.

"It's like a puzzle. You build it, discovering some pieces, and the ones you place leave the shape of those missing," Shua says about the art of selecting which stories to publish and in what order. For instance, the last story was written long ago: "It's really old. It's a chronicle of my father's wake, who died in 1975. I never wanted to publish it because it felt too intimate." The writer always resisted discussing close people in her texts: "You'll never find my daughters or my husband. In this case, my mother had already passed away, and my sister gave her permission, but it's also intimate regarding myself. I had many doubts, and now it's time to publish it."

In that wake, there's an unforgettable gesture by the mother character: rubbing the deceased's chest insistently to keep it warm until the daughters arrive and can touch it one last time as a living body. Shua felt compelled to write it: "It's what my mother did; I had never seen it done before. I couldn't let such a theatrical, tremendous situation, so typical of my mother, pass by."

In all the stories in the book, illness, the body, and the end of a carefree state to enter a different one appear in some way: "When we are young and healthy, we don't have a body: we are our body. Then, from a certain age, we feel we carry it as if it were something separate from us. And it takes up more and more of our time. A friend used to say before meetings: 'Everyone can talk about one illness and one grandchild, nothing more.'"

From the beginning, illness has occupied many pages in Ana María Shua's work. Her first novel, for example, was titled 'The Patient'. But perhaps the most important part of this new book is the first story. It's even strange to call it a story. "It has something of a chronicle, yes. It happened to me, but many, many years ago, in 2001." She refers to a cancer process with metastasis that required both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. At that time, she wrote part of the text, which appears in italics, and now it has been completed. Her description of everything is very precise. "Chemotherapy is truly terrible, especially certain drugs in particular are very harsh. On the other hand, radiation at the time is not felt, but the effects stay with you for life. Radiation is tough. But well, thanks to both, which worked like a scalpel, I was cured, and here I am." 25 years later.

The social debate on whether to call it a personal fight was also experienced by the writer: "In reality, one doesn't fight. I was standing there on the sidewalk, and a bus came and ran over me. The patient is a very passive subject; their choices are very few. And yet I did feel at some point like someone who had that possibility to fight, like in a Jack London story, in the middle of the ice with wolves chasing me." Shua experienced neurological effects that made the process a torment, preventing her from seeing well, hearing, tasting, smelling, and writing for a year. But everything returned: "One day I went out and saw a fruit shop, and the colours of the fruits... it's inconceivably beautiful to start seeing the colours again, with their brightness and beauty."