Anatole Broyard (1920–90), the US-American writer, bookstore owner, literary critic and editor of The New York Times Book Review, was an important cultural figure in New York City’s literary scene. He wrote daily book reviews for fifteen years and published his reflections on literature and everyday experiences in two anthologies – Aroused by Books (1974) and Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980). Broyard’s memoir Kafka Was the Rage focuses on life in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s and was published posthumously in 1993. After his death, it became known that Broyard had concealed his mixed-race origin and passed for white (B. Broyard; Gates). In Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine, Broyard’s writing about his own and his father’s illness has become a standard reference, anthologised in Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (1992). In Intoxicated, Broyard describes his dissatisfaction with the reductive ways with which evidence-based medicine considers prostate cancer. He diagnoses an impoverishment and blandness that is at odds with the richness and depth that Broyard, to his own surprise, experienced when he got sick. Broyard claims in Intoxicated that the technical, matter-of-fact approaches of modern health care should be fundamentally rethought so that the boundary experience of illness become more fully resonant. Thus, rather than depriving illness of meaning, as Sontag polemically urges in her critique of illness metaphors (99), Broyard wishes to add more meaning, more options of sense-making and more capacious understandings of what it means to be sick. Metaphor is a crucial instrument in this endeavour.

In Intoxicated, Broyard makes a compelling case for metaphor over narrative by modelling a playful use of metaphors as an expression of his individual style. Like Susan Sontag and Audre Lorde, Broyard applies the battle metaphor to illness and creatively imagines different scenarios for his fight. However, the battle metaphor is only one of many that Broyard uses for illness. Moreover, instead of being primarily driven by an adversarial or resistant motivation, Broyard’s approach is best understood, I suggest, in terms of its reparative or even joyful qualities. In fact, Broyard directly calls for a ‘style for illness’ (Intoxicated 25), which he associates with self-love and self-care and which is informed by exaggeration, vanity and pleasure.