Lorde narrates her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy with the purpose of contextualizing her ordeal within concerns shared by many cancer-surviving women about the meaning of the illness and its impact on female identity.

Lorde was a Black lesbian poet—an identity that she repeatedly mentions in the text to help the reader understand the marginalized context from which she speaks. At the time in which she writes this memoir, Lorde was 44 years old, had a partner named Frances, two children, and close friendships with numerous women friends, including authors Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff. Lorde discovered a lump in her right breast on Labor Day in 1978 during a monthly breast exam.

Frances is Lorde’s partner, who spends time with her before and after the mastectomy operation. Lorde describes her support as “as steady warm light close by to the island within which [she] had to struggle alone” (27). Several times in the text, Lorde compares Frances’s likeness to that of a sunflower. Frances supports Lorde’s decision to have a mastectomy, believing it to be the most sensible course of action. The healthcare workers who attend to Lorde acknowledge Frances as her partner.

Poet Adrienne Rich is Lorde’s close friend, confidante, and colleague. Rich, along with others in Lorde’s circle, assists both Lorde and Frances with daily errands to make their lives easier during their ordeal. Rich, like Lorde, was a lesbian feminist poet. Rich’s fame surpassed Lorde’s, however, as did her book sales. Rich died in 2012.

Elizabeth, who is called Beth in the memoir, is Lorde’s daughter. Though he is never mentioned in the text, Beth has a brother named Jonathan. She cries after Lorde reveals that she plans to have a mastectomy, expressing her own sentimental attachment to her mother’s breasts. Adrienne Rich explains to Beth how Lorde’s feelings are different from Beth’s due to differences in their respective ages and experiences. Beth’s sadness in response to the mastectomy is indicative of how daughters learn from their mothers how to be women, in addition to internalizing cultural ideas about what it means to be a woman. For Beth, Lorde’s loss of her breasts is a sign of a loss of a part of herself, though Lorde doesn’t experience it that way.

Eudora Garrett was one of Lorde’s former lovers. A much older woman, she was 44 when Lorde was 19. She had a mastectomy and no reconstructive surgery. Lorde recalls “touch[ing] the deeply scarred hollow under her right shoulder and across her chest” (30). Lorde describes Garrett as lanky with a “gap-toothed lopsided smile” (30). Her experience with Garrett seems to be her first intimate encounter with another woman who has had a mastectomy—a fate that Lorde was probably unable to fathom as a personal possibility at such a young age.

Michelle Cliff is part of the circle of women friends that rallies around Lorde during her ordeal with cancer. Cliff, like Lorde and Adrienne Rich, was a writer, perhaps best known for her novel, No Telephone to Heaven, set in her native Jamaica and featuring her recurring protagonist, Clare Savage. Cliff wrote mostly about the impacts of racism and colonialism, as well as the homophobia that plagued Jamaica. Cliff was the longtime partner of Adrienne Rich from 1975 until the Rich’s death in 2012. Cliff died from liver cancer, the same disease that ultimately killed Lorde.