The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks- Author Skloot and Her Subjectivity(COPYRIGHT © 2011 MIKAEL POWELL. All Rights Reserved)-DRAFT
Introduction
I do remember from my courses in qualitative research and information gathering, about observer bias and the lens that researchers have which is based upon their race, gender, life experiences, passions and other things. Even our assumptions influence our perception (Silverman, 2006). However, I think that the issue of subjectivity in regard to this book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” does not concern me because of three major reasons. I consider the audience to whom the book was written, the narrative style of the book, and reader’s inherent ways of justifying this genre of literature.
Firstly, this book was directed to and arguably written for a population more general than the research community. The author writes that the desire was to “send the book into the world” (Skloot, 2009, p.335). Thus, to make the book more assessable might mean to make the book less rigid in regard to research-level justifications of researcher objectivity. Indeed, a more scientific literary work would list areas of possible bias at the beginning. Skloot says that she will leave it to “scholars and experts in the field” (2009, p. x) to cover those areas outside of the purpose of the book.
Secondly, the written style of the book promotes a third party omnificent storyteller. To cast doubt on the narrator and provide the idea and background information to question subjectivity would taint content and set up another dynamic -considering and reconsidering the validity of the story. Skloot does describe her book as a work of non-fiction, but it is a narrative nonetheless.
Lastly, readers constantly justify their belief in the story, without need for more information on the author to assess subjectivity. Although the book is carefully and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by many experts, every reader sets how much poetic license they can tolerate and still believe it to be a work of non-fiction. For instance, Skloot writes “On the nights Day works, Henrietta and Sadie would wait until the door slammed, count to one hundred…” (2009, p. 42). It does not seem rational to believe that Henrietta and Sadie did this ritual every single time, and readers face the choice of believing whether they ever did it at all. Perhaps the perceived characters of Henrietta and Sadie were such that they may have been capable of that routine. The author gives no citation for this passage in the ‘Notes’ section, so readers must justify their acceptance of this being a work of non-fiction. Although most of the book is event-driven, it is more troubling to me when the author writes, during a discussion on human biological material, “How you should feel about all this isn’t obvious.” (Skloot, 2009, p.319). The sentence phrasing makes me feel that the author is overreaching. Should this sentence read ‘how the majority of persons feel, based upon published research” instead of ‘you’?
Regardless, I feel comfortable that that overwhelming focus of the book is away from the author and any personal biases she may harbor.
References:
Skloot, R. (2009). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.
Silverman, D. (2006). Interpreting qualitative data (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. (ISBN: 9781412922456).
