This paper interrogates how autobiographical texts narrating the trauma of a cancer diagnosis and its subsequent treatment might be read as sites of therapeutic and ethical intervention. When writing about the physical and psychic injury caused by a potentially life-threatening disease, an author often performs imaginative acts of reclaiming and retelling her or his own story, and in so doing challenges and resists culturally reductive and unethical readings of the ill body as medicalised, marginalised or stigmatised.