the kingdom of illness

KateGate, Audre Lorde and broken Britain

1.    biopsy

In 1978 Audre Lorde went to hospital to have a biopsy. Despite being told there was a high chance that she had breast cancer, the test results eventually came back negative. Of the experience she wrote that ‘in the interim three weeks between being told I might have cancer and finding out it was not so, I met for the first time the essential questions of my own mortality. I was going to die, and it might be a lot sooner than I had ever conceived of.’ One year later, a 46-year-old Lorde would return to have another biopsy taken, and this time there would be no doubt; she had a cancerous tumour in her breast.

Waiting for test results creates a surreal vacuum in the lives of patients, whose imaginations run wild with possible outcomes. Understandably, it brings to the fore existential questions about the manner of one’s death, and how life as you know it might change depending on the outcome. In stark contrast to Lorde, it seems that a cancer diagnosis was not something that Princess of Wales or her doctors had seriously entertained during her abdominal surgery at the beginning of the year. Instead, the diagnosis came as a ‘huge shock’, to herself, her family and the wider world, whose speculation about her mysterious disappearance had reached fever pitch. (Guilty as charged, m’lud).

By the time she was in her forties, Lorde had published several acclaimed collections of poetry and was a professor of English at the City University of New York. After surgery, the self-identifying ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, asked ‘where are the dykes who had mastectomies?’ The Princess, who recently turned 42, has spent the second half of her life as a working member of the British royal family. Perhaps she, like Lorde, is now wondering ‘where are all the Princesses with cancer?’ – the view from her sick bed is a uniquely strange one, full of faces that she does not recognise wishing her well.   

In her Cancer Diaries, Lorde chronicled her experience of breast cancer. ‘I carry death around in my body like a condemnation’ she wrote, ‘But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving into it.’ Lorde died when she was 58, after finding out that the cancer had metastasised in her liver.

Sooner or later, Kate will die too.

2.    bodies

I’ve have been thinking about what Hilary Mantel might have said, thought and written about the hysteria events of the past month. The author of the Wolf Hall trilogy used fiction to imaginatively capture the trials and tribulations of the British monarchy in an effort to make their mythology tangible.

Mantel treated living Royals no differently, in that she publicly tried to make sense of who they were in light of their actions and their family history. In her LRB lecture Royal Bodies, she controversially described the then Duchess of Cambridge as a ‘shop-window mannequin’ whose sole purpose was to breed. ‘Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character. She appears precision made’.

When I returned to that lecture this week, it became clear to me that Mantel already articulated much of what she might have said about KateGate and the peculiar events leading to the disclosure of her cancer diagnosis. Take this comment, reflecting on the death of Kate’s mother-in-law Diana: ‘Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.’

To be royal is to have a body that exists to be looked at, argues Mantel. This is not a earth-shattering insight, and is something which those who advise the Royal family know full well; it is why Kate was stood outside the Lindo Wing with a newborn baby just hours after she gave birth. It is why they drip feed the public family photographs throughout the year. To be an absent body, in a royal context, is to subvert your raison d’être. ‘‘They’ [Royals] are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.’

Kate has been praised for her bravery in sharing her cancer diagnosis with the world. The Guardian acknowledged that her request for ‘time, space and privacy’ ‘must be granted. Even for holders of high-profile public roles, illness is a deeply private matter, unfolding as it does inside the body.’ And yet I wonder what this even means? Does it mean that people should just stop sharing salicious gossip about her and William? Or does it mean that the media will temporarily act as if this branch of the royal family doesn’t properly ‘exist’? As far as I can tell, media interest has not abated, rather, it has changed tune. Simply opting for favourable news coverage is not the same as genuinely respecting a request for privacy.

And I suppose herein lies the rub for the Princess and Kensington Palace. According to our constitution, her body, and those of the family she married into, is the thing that is required for the proper functioning of the ‘Kingdom’, in that they confer legitimacy upon our institutions as our Heads of State. If say, five senior members of the family were out of action (cancer, exile, alleged child-sex offences) and things still appear to be broadly functioning, it rather begs the question of what, exactly, their bodies are for. What was the ‘magic’ that their bodies brought to the table?

‘Cancer, as a disease that can strike anywhere’, wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is a disease of the body. Far from revealing anything spiritual, it reveals that the body is, all too woefully, just the body.’

3.    the body politic

Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps, when we look around at the state of things right now, the stability provided by a healthy Royal Family is not to be underestimated. After all, when it was first announced in January that the King and Princess were both undergoing medical treatment, some news outlets responded to the news with claims that it was symbiotic of a wider malaise. The Daily Mail claimed that news of their treatment left the nation ‘reeling’.

If we were to choose a metaphor to describe the current state of the nation, I think cancer would be fairly an apt one. In the abstract, a cancer is something insidious that erodes something slowly or in secret. Well, it’s safe to say our nation is reeling and dysfunctional. There’s no better demonstration of this than the fact that in 2010, 60,000 food bank packages were handed out in Britain. Last year, this figure stood at 2.5 million. In 2022, an estimated 14% of all adults experienced food insecurity, and it’s thought that the average worker is £14,000 worse off today than if earnings had continued to rise as they had been in the period before the financial crash.

As far as I can see, the functioning and health of our Royal family has made little impact on the wellbeing and stability of our ‘Kingdom’ as a whole. Beyond giving us something to talk about over dinner, the biggest role the serve is to distract us from the actual problems this country faces. The media perpetuate this psychodrama because it sells newspapers, which we buy, feverishly wanting to know what terrible thing Meghan and Harry have done this week.

And so, in believing that we see our own lives reflected in their own, we collude with the Royal establishment, failing to see that the illness which afflicts our Kingdom is not one which can be solved not through the healing touch of a sovereign, but through the democratic processes which his family’s existence so frequently overshadows. In his latest piece for The New Yorker, Sam Knight argues that in her final years, the Queen’s ‘survival helped to contain a sense of crisis’ - and seems to suggest this was a good thing. But should our Head of State effectively be a gilded sticking plaster for the gaping wounds of our society? Or is it better to remove that plaster and let the fresh air of reality heal that wound?

Is the disease fatal? In both instances, I sincerely hope not. But our continued subservience to and obsession with a Royal Family which embodies the gross inequalities of our nation is an impediment to solving these problems, rather than a cure.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place

Susan Sontag - Illness as Metaphor

Hi friends,

Thank you for reading, and for being here. If you’re new to the newsletter then this recent interview I did for

Lyndsay Kaldor

‘s Atelier series might be of interest to you. We talk about my work as an editor, how becoming a parent has affected my creativity, and generally how I keep sane (spoiler: it’s Sertraline).

As ever, I’m very grateful to my paid supporters, who effectively sponsor the creation of these essays. Without this help, I would not be able to justify the time I spend researching and writing The Murmuration. If you’ve enjoyed reading one or more of my essays, then do consider becoming a paid supporter. It’s a good way to keep independent, free-thinking writing alive, if that’s your thing.

When I sat down to write today’s newsletter I realised that I had far too many articles and books to recommend. So in lieu of an enormous list here are my top three culture picks:

Recommendation corner: heal thyself edition

1. Bluey: Series 1 Episode 32 - Bumpy and the Wise Old Wolfhound

For the uninitiated, Bluey is an Australian children’s TV program about a young dog which has quickly gained cult status amongst kids and parents. This episode looks at illness in an original way that I’d never thought about before. (If you’re skeptical about watching a kid’s cartoon, then I’d suggest you start with

Katie Clapham

’s explanatory ode to the Heeler’s )

2. What have fourteen years of Conservative rule done to Britain?

Sam Knight, who writes long-reads for The New Yorker, has written this damning account of how the Tories have systematically eroded the fabric and functioning of our society. Read it and weep.

3. Artist to Artist: Edmund de Waal and Theaster Gates

This conversation was a joy to listen to. Edmund and Theaster are both incredible artists who clearly hold each other’s work in such high regard.

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