She also draws our attention to the book’s second arc: the protagonist’s approach to her body. To her illness, she reflects, “I never really knew I had a body. The books I had read were focused on caring for the soul. As a result, the body was completely set aside, and while my soul had seemingly made no progress, my body had secretly deteriorated.”

At first, the narrator tries hard to hide in literature, though her goal is more to avoid her body than to care for her soul. When she checks into the hospital for her biopsy, she brings Mrs Bovary in French, English, and Chinese to compare translations (the English one, she snorts, is “terrible”). But unsurprisingly, she can’t concentrate, and she puts the novel aside to focus on her new surroundings and equally new fears. After the operation, however, she goes back to reading books in her mind, and she controls the disgust she feels at carrying a pan to catch drainage from her wound by deciding that she is just like Santiago Nasar, the protagonist of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretoldwho ends the novel with his own intestines in his hands. But Santiago dies – it’s in the title – and Xi Xi’s narrator is diagnosed with cancer. She tries to take refuge in literature again after her mastectomy, and turns to the ancient Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seasbut in the myths of one-legged spirits and headless, nippleless gods, she sees an unwelcome reflection. “I was a monster,” she thinks. “I had lost a breast—I was a monster formed by a lack of organs.”

Yet the same curiosity that led her to books from across continents and centuries leads her to her new physical self. Despite her grief over her mastectomy, she marvels at the tight, leak-proof sutures that hold the skin of her chest together. She sees the existence of sutures as both a sign of tremendous human progress and proof that the “human body is extraordinary … a truly heavenly garment without seams.” Soon she is out of her apartment, walking and exercising, gradually adjusting not only to the rhythm of recovery but also to her newfound interest in caring for her body. As she undergoes radiation treatment, she focuses on her clothing, her diet, her physical relationships with her doctors. She wants to know whether the surgeon who performed her mastectomy saw her as a whole being or merely “bones and tendons and flesh,” and she is delighted when a class of medical students comes to examine her. Her surgery was only a few months ago, but she’s changed enough that the class simultaneously makes her feel “like I have a different body, like I’m separate from it” and gives her a chance to “practice getting to know myself.” By the end of the book, she still needs that practice. Mourning for a breast barely touches on breasts until the final chapter, a survey of breasts in art history. Xi Xi has her protagonist discuss pyramids, Madonnas, and a nude Henry Moore with hollow breasts as stand-ins for talking about the one she’s lost, which is still somewhat beyond her reach. Her relationship with her body has come a long way, but she doesn’t fully inhabit it yet.