‘It’s some sort of cosmic joke’: Tracy Sorensen wrote a book about surviving cancer. Now it has returned

‘It’s absolutely laughable that we think we’re in control of our lives,’ says Tracy Sorensen, author of The Vitals, a cancer memoir told from the point of view of her abdominal organs. Photograph: Monique Lovick/The Guardian

It was a plot twist no one saw coming, least of all the author. Last month Tracy Sorensen was preparing to launch her highly anticipated second book, The Vitals – a playful and unconventional cancer memoir/novel written from the viewpoint of her organs – while dealing with a niggling winter cough.

The Miles Franklin-longlisted author and academic assumed she just had a chest infection. “They whacked me straight in for a chest X-ray and that was it, I was back in cancer land,” she says from her home in Bathurst during downtime between infusions of chemotherapy and a targeted “biological agent” to treat lung cancer. It’s a recurrence of the advanced primary peritoneal cancer she had – and vanquished – in 2014.

“Despite everything I know about cancer, having written a whole book about it, having immersed myself in it, it still feels shocking,” Sorensen says. “[After] 8.5 of remission … it was absolutely the last thing I was expecting.”