It was a plot twist no one saw coming, least of all the author. Last month Tracy Sorensen was preparing to launch her highly anticipated second book, The Vitals – a playful and unconventional cancer memoir/novel written from the viewpoint of her organs – while dealing with a niggling winter cough.
The Miles Franklin-longlisted author and academic assumed she just had a chest infection. “They whacked me straight in for a chest X-ray and that was it, I was back in cancer land,” she says from her home in Bathurst during downtime between infusions of chemotherapy and a targeted “biological agent” to treat lung cancer. It’s a recurrence of the advanced primary peritoneal cancer she had – and vanquished – in 2014.
“Despite everything I know about cancer, having written a whole book about it, having immersed myself in it, it still feels shocking,” Sorensen says. “[After] 8.5 of remission … it was absolutely the last thing I was expecting.”
She “would not”, she jests darkly, “advise this as a publicity stunt”.
“Having the cancer recur right now is some sort of cosmic joke … But it goes with what I’m saying in the book, which is that it’s absolutely laughable that we think we’re in control of our lives.”
As a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, Sorensen had years earlier undergone risk-reduction surgery (a double mastectomy and ovariectomy) to try to dodge the “death sentence” that has stalked so many of her family members. So her 2014 cancer diagnosis came as a shock to Sorensen. “Primary peritoneal cancer is the kind of ovarian cancer you can still get even if you’ve had your ovaries removed,” she explains. “And so I became this outlier … I’m an extremely rare case.”
Surviving the ordeal – which she recounts in The Vitals in an action-packed piece of speculative nonfiction set inside the squishy confines of her peritoneal cavity – left her with fewer organs than she started with and gave her the “kick up the bum” she needed to finish her debut novel, which was published in 2018. The Lucky Galah, which she had been chipping away at for more than 15 years (the idea was already percolating when we worked together at a Sydney newspaper in 1999) was set in a remote Western Australian town during the 1969 moon landing and also features a non-human narrator: a flightless pet galah. The Lucky Galah soared, and was nominated for a slew of Australian literary prizes, including the 2019 Miles Franklin award.
With cancer in the rear-view mirror, Sorensen pulled out the sack of life-sized woollen guts she had crocheted during her treatment in an effort to “get to know” her organs and began bringing them to life as characters on the page. It was a process, Sorensen says, of “extreme anthropomorphising”.
Among The Vitals’ cast is Peri the peritoneum, a ditzy conspiracy theorist loosely inspired by cancer fraudster Belle Gibson; a “wandering womb” named Ute who carts around two pet kelpies (ovaries) in her tray; a workaholic liver named Liv; a gluttonous stomach dubbed Gaster; and an anarcho-communist spleen named Rage who is seduced by an irresistible young tumour (and rampant capitalist) named Baby.
“The comic possibilities were just everywhere for me,” says Sorensen. “And I had perfect licence to have fun with it because it was my own body.
“These organs [are] just stumbling around – they’ve got absolutely no idea what’s really going on, but the reader knows what’s going on, so you just keep playing with that, pushing it.”
The result is a rollicking ride, as if The Poseidon Adventure, The Famous Five and Animal Farm were dunked in a vat of Ken Done Australiana, steeped in the philosophy of eco-feminist Val Plumwood and translated into satirical medicalese.
In late 2019, as Sorensen struggled to transform a “mountain of research” and medical jargon into whimsical metaphors, opportunity came knocking: she was awarded the $100,000 Judy Harris writer-in-residence fellowship, an annual grant given by the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre to a writer exploring health-related themes (previous recipients include Emily Maguire and Sorensen’s literary mentor Charlotte Wood). She was given her own office inside the medical research institute; the specialists down the hall were only too keen to jump into the “creative playpen” with her.
When the pandemic struck a few months into her residency, Sorensen hotfooted it home to Bathurst, from where she would watch the institute’s scientific seminars. It was those video conferences that gave her the idea for the organs in her novel to meet regularly via Zoom “as a metaphor – a way of conjuring the continuous communication between organs”.
“The cancer memoir is normally written from the point of view of the important suffering cancer patient. I’m now a suffering cancer patient and I’m trying to save my life, so I’m not denigrating that. But there’s always, always, always 50 million other points of view for every situation,” she says.
“We need different ways of seeing ourselves. If we just go on saying ‘We are the most important thing no matter what’, we will destroy this planet. I’m writing [The Vitals] for people who are interested in radically new ways of seeing the world.”
Sorensen says she was determined to limit “battle” tropes in The Vitals. “This idea that an ordinary person down the road who gets cancer caused it themselves and it’s up to them to join the ‘battle’; and ‘fight’ and ‘win’ is really exhausting when you’re ill – that’s a lot to put on people,” she says.
“I think the idea of homeostasis is a much nicer way of thinking about this than war and battle metaphors because actually something happens and the cells respond … Which I just find awe-inspiring.”
Sorensen also wanted to encourage readers to be curious about their anatomy and not ignore pesky symptoms. In The Vitals, Queen Bee – an avatar for Sorensen’s brain – is too busy marking student papers to pay attention to her mutinous guts.
“Before 2014, I couldn’t have told you precisely where my pancreas was, I couldn’t have told you where my spleen was, I had never heard the words ‘greater omentum’. All of this was a bag of mystery and it didn’t bother me at all,” she says. “When it’s all working fine, you don’t particularly need to know.”
Another impetus for writing The Vitals was Sorensen’s growing “exasperation and fear around anti-science sentiment”. Pseudoscience, she says, “overlaps with climate scepticism – so it’s just a terrifying bundle”.
“This is not a small thing for me; this is quite literally life-and-death,” she says. “Are we going to have wellness warriors using their beautiful young bodies as kind of assets on social media to monetise people’s fears and bandy about absolute nonsense?”
Being treated for lung cancer as Covid spreads unchecked poses a new challenge. “Last time [in 2014] I felt that all the problems were just coming from within, whereas now I’m incredibly conscious that any kind of chest infection would be really, deeply problematic for me,” she says.
Still, says Sorensen, who turns 60 later this year, “The only thing I can do is to keep being incredibly philosophical. We all get a narrow band in history: that’s our spot, so we come into it and go out of it in ways that we absolutely can’t control. I’m just here for the ride in between.”
The Vitals is out now through Picador
