This article examines Lisa Ray’s memoir Close to the Bone (2019) to investigate how everyday objects and spaces within hospitals mediate patients’ experiences of illness and enable the formation of empathetic relationships. The study draws on new materialism, actor-network theory, and theories of care such as Annemarie Mol’s logic of care. This framework enables an analysis of materiality not as a passive backdrop but as an active, relational force that co-constitutes bodily experience, perception, and care practices within clinical settings. The article addresses a critical gap in existing cancer narratives and medical humanities scholarship, which have predominantly privileged subjective, affective, or discursive accounts of illness while overlooking the role of material environments, objects, and technologies in shaping lived experience. It foregrounds the hospital’s material landscape as central to the hermeneutics of chronic illness. Focusing on spaces such as waiting rooms and on mundane as well as technological objects, the study identifies a central tension in moments poised between life and death: while detachment from materiality is often presumed appropriate, patients remain connected to the material world around them. By tracing these entanglements, the article shows how ordinary objects and spaces soften clinical rigidities, mediate care, and sustain affective and social bonds. Rather than adopting a binary approach that pits care and technology in opposition, the article integrates and reinterprets them together. It argues that waiting areas, everyday items, and devices not only mediate care but also assist in forming social bonds and generate new meanings of health, illness and care.

Keywords: Cancer memoir; materials; objects; waiting rooms; machines; care

DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2026-3202-11

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