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I am an English teacher, so mostly I read literary texts and talk to folks about interpreting them. This week I had a fascinating conversation with a student about a thesis she wants to write about the genre of "medical memoirs." We talked about the difference between genres--a book read as a literary biography might be expected to focus on the unique experiences of one person, while the same book, read as a medical memoir, might be useful only if that information is generalizable to a larger population. I suggested that, in both cases, the text is an attempt to make sense of what is senseless, to shape what seems shapeless, to order what seems disordered. But then the student observed that that's not always the case; the particular text which interests her--Lucy Grealy's tortured Autobiography of a Face--is very sad, very hard to take, not @ all reassuring to write or read. She asked, "What makes a text therapeutic?" When are the tales we tell helpful, when not?