The title's "two voices" are vividly present, not crafted into literary memoir form, but immediate in the access they offer to the process of apprehending terminal illness in all its effects on both patient and loved ones.

Rosenblum's health care up until diagnosis appears to have been astonishingly poor: several physicians failed to consider that the lump in her breast could be cancer, and when she insisted on a mammogram, it was incorrectly read. She sues her health care organization for malpractice and is awarded a large financial settlement. The effects of receiving this "blood money," as Rosenblum calls it, are complex, allowing the couple to travel and to fulfill many of their material desires in the limited time they have but, at the same time, it has a terrible significance, price of a shorter life, and false recompense for the agony of treatment and illness.

The passages in which Rosenblum draws up her will are especially moving; with courageous honesty both writers describe the painful emotions this process generates. Rosenblum resents the idea of others enjoying this tainted money, and Butler struggles not to equate the money with love, not to want it all as a symbolic replacement of her own loss.

Also notable (and a valuable text for teaching) is "Living in an Unstable Body," a sustained meditation by Rosenblum on her changing body, and the way cancer has affected her sense of what it means to be embodied. She analyzes the close interconnections between body, language, and truth, and the way cancer (and perhaps all illness, to different degrees) poses a threat to identity by disrupting these links, making the body alien, its messages incomprehensible.