The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
Published 1980 · 128 pages · 40,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Cancer Journals to read?
The Cancer Journals scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Forceful, direct prose that combines political argument with raw bodily description.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Political and feminist abstractions emerge directly from Lorde's specific bodily and medical experience.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- High density of political argument, personal testimony, and cultural critique in a short text.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Political arguments emerge from and return to personal experience rather than being stated abstractly.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The breast, the scar, and silence function as recurring figures carrying specific political significance.
- Ironic distance: 14 out of 100
- Urgent and direct; irony appears only when exposing the double standards imposed on sick women.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Each section arrives at clear political and personal positions.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Journal and essay form organized chronologically through diagnosis, treatment, and reflection.
How The Cancer Journals is regarded
The Cancer Journals holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.