A divinity professor and young mother with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis explores the pain and joy of living without certainty.
Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the school of divinity at Duke, and had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart after years of trying, when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost 30 pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.
As she navigates the aftermath of her diagnosis, Kate pulls the listener deeply into her life, which is populated with a colorful, often hilarious collection of friends, pastors, parents, and doctors, and shares her laser-sharp reflections on faith, friendship, love, and death. She wonders why suffering makes her feel like a loser and explores the burden of positivity. Trying to relish the time she still has with her son and husband, she realizes she must change her habit of skipping to the end and planning the next move. A historian of the “American prosperity gospel” – the creed of the mega-churches that promises believers a cure for tragedy, if they just want it badly enough – Bowler finds that, in the wake of her diagnosis, she craves these same “outrageous certainties”. She wants to know why it’s so hard to surrender control over that which you have no control. She contends with the terrifying fact that, even for her husband and child, she is not the lynchpin of existence, and that even without her, life will go on.
Kate Bowler is warm, witty, and ruthless, and, like Paul Kalanithi, one of the talented, courageous few who can articulate the grief she feels as she contemplates her own mortality.
best memoir I’ve read. Wow! There is something tremendously powerful and refreshing about Kate Bowler’s writing. She doesn’t pretend that life is anything but complicated and messy, and she tells her story in a way that helps all of us see ourselves in it. The book is profound in its wisdom but also relatable and hilarious…I found myself often laughing and crying on the same page. As a working mom with young kids, I am especially grateful for Kate’s honesty about parenthood and the deep hopes and fears that parents…
It was like watching an episode of This is Us Bowler’s book, is honest and raw. It is even better than watching an episode of This is Us: it breaks your heart in the best way possible and it is so sincere. As a Christian who lost a friend at age 20, I struggled with the questions, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Kate Bowler explores this problem without feeling the need to fix it, justify it, or even give a reason. She lands at the conclusion that life is beautiful, life is hard. This book is for those who have been told…
Raw, Wrenching, Hard Not to Read in a Single Sitting Kate Bowler lost thirty pounds without trying and was wracked by stomach pain nearly daily while going about her life as a professor at her beloved alma mater with an adoring husband and very young toddler son. She saw doctor after doctor, each dismissing her concerns, until she finally refused to leave a doctor’s office until he actually TRIED something. Dismissive and hostile, he wrote orders for a CT scan while assuring her all her symptoms were psychosomatic.Then the results…