Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a fictional debut novel by Maddie Mortimer, published in March 2022 to highlight the life of a cancer patient, mediation on sickness and death. The novel precisely offers a fervent coming-to-age narrative through Lia’s life told from a spiteful voice of her disease. Maddie Mortimer is a scholar and screenwriter born in 1996. Mortimer graduated from Bristol University with a bachelor's degree in English literature and currently lives in London.
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is Mortimer’s first debut work of fiction that brought her into the global limelight because she touched on an informative topic exploring the themes of family, hope, and life secrets. Besides Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the other fictional and nonfictional novels that have touched on the topic of cancer include My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Unlike these other novels, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies does not focus on the curative aspect of cancer, hospital visits, and hospice care. Instead, Mortimer's novel focuses on cancer's insidiousness, ingenuity, and endurance intuitions.
The novel follows the life of Lia, her husband Hurry, and their teenage daughter, Iris. At first, the reader comes across a perfect family of three but quickly learns that Lia has breast cancer, which has reappeared after several years. Lia is in her forties and is slowly dying because the stage of her cancer is untreatable. As the novel progresses, Lia’s body becomes weaker, and the cancer on her becomes bolder. In the novel, there is a scuffle between the first-person voice of the disease holding back Lia and the third-person recitation of Lia’s storyline. Lia’s present-day life and worsening health condition are told from the third-person perspective, which also touches on how her tribulations started nearly twenty years ago during her teenage years. On the other hand, Iris is struggling to come to terms with Lia’s past secrets that are coming out after the diagnosis, which are also threatening the family's stability.
As the novel concludes, the uneven landscape of Lia’s body puts every character into their rightful place. It becomes evident that her deeply religious parents, Ann and Peter, shaped Lia’s life. Consequently, Mortimer's novel is amusing and pitiful simultaneously, but it unearths the obscurity and flippancy of Lia’s life to a harmonious outcome.
