No Cure for Being Human

(And Other Truths I Need to Hear)

By: Kate Bowler

Narrated by: Kate Bowler

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn’t choose?

“Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.”—Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed

It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?

Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age thirty-five, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today’s “best life now” advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born.

With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we’re going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between—and there’s no cure for being human.

Wisdom and humor

I have been taken by Kate Bowler since first reading her New York Times opinion piece a few years ago. I have followed up with her first book, her podcast, and now her new book. She continues to impress me with her wisdom and authenticity while facing her mortality as a young new mom. In addition, her delightful sense of humor and her tender descriptions of her son and his activities touch me deeply.

Honest memoir and brilliant theological reflection

The author is a skilled writer and trained theologian who has the gift of distilling complicated truths into beautiful prose. very moving. should be required reading for ministers. rev. Paula buford, pastoral counselor

Phenomenal

Absolutely enjoyed this book - and learned so much from Kate Bowler. I do with each one of her books. And I absolutely love that she reads the audiobook!

I just can't get enough of Kate Bowler.

I have enjoyed every minute of this book and the one I read before it by the same author. While chronicling her very specific individual journey through cancer and remission, she manages to share her life in such a way that she taps into universal truths. The vocabulary she uses to discuss them is as incisive and gorgeous as I can imagine. This book is very much Kate and, at the same time, very much everyone else who navigates the world with a keen mind and introspection.

You know the feeling you have when you complete an excellent work of fiction and the book is complete? There is a sort of ungentle wrenching out of a reality you very much want to stay in. I can't remember when else I've experienced that reading nonfiction, but I have done so here. I will be waiting with bated breath for whatever Kate wants to share with us next.

Just beautiful in every way!

This book is a must and has opened my worn heart to feel into new places that I didn’t think were still possible.