About one in three Australians will get cancer before the age of 75. Every year over 75,000 Australians are newly diagnosed with a serious form of the disease. Currently, around half will still be alive five years later, and survival rates have been increasing over the last twenty years. This book is about the experience of surviving cancer, an experience that most people imagine to be pretty disturbing but also pretty wonderful. In the course of talking to cancer patients about their health care, however, the authors noticed that many survivors -- people who appeared to be free of cancer after the phase of diagnosis and treatment -- were less happy than might have been expected. Time and again, they discovered a recurrent theme in survivors' narratives: that it was difficult to be a person who has had cancer, difficult to be a survivor, difficult to communicate the nature of their experiences. For survivors, there has been no recognized way to talk about what it is like to bear the cancer label.