I watched Swedish literary talk show ‘Babel‘ the other day. Host Jessika Gedin was interviewing Kristian Gidlund, who has written a book, and a blog, about fighting stomach cancer. Gedin prefaced the interview by saying that several people had suggested she’d read Gidlund’s book, but that she’d been hesitant to do so until Gidlund was going to be a guest on the show (and she had no choice).

We have to assume that it was fear that kept Gedin from reading a book written by a 29-year-old cancer patient.

I told my Intro to Media Studies class this story as an example of what happens when we avoid topics that we perceive to be ‘sensitive’: We exclude experiences, and people, who have the right to be heard, and from whom we probably have something to learn.

One of my students agreed vehemently. “Books like that are supposed to be inspirational”, he said. “It’s wrong to avoid them”.

When I told him that Gidlund is dying, and that he said in the interview that he doesn’t expect to make it much past summer, my student’s face changed. He hadn’t thought about that, that cancer actually can kill you. He didn’t think of that because so much of the cancer rhetoric is concentrated on the fight, the heroes, the survivors, the inspirational stories.

Gedin introduced Gidlund by talking about the shift in his life when he went from being a touring musician to a cancer patient. “Plans for the future were replaced by cancer treatments”, she said.

When you are diagnosed with cancer treatments are your plans for the future. And, given the circumstances, they seem to be pretty good plans too. At least to you. It was irritating to me to watch an interview where the interviewer proved herself to be incapable of appreciating that her perspective is a perspective, not the truth. Instead she kept using her perspective, the outsider’s perspective, to ‘explain’ the experience of her cancer patient guest.

I suspect she hadn’t read the book after all.