In this essay I describe the development of my prose work entitled Jorden är platt (Earth is flat). In the text we encounter a woman whose 40-year-old brother is diagnosed with lung cancer. The brother has been living a hectic life of drug addiction. The relationship between brother and sister is characterized by ironic distance, but also a lot of love. My aim is to write a funny yet dramatic and serious novel about illness and foreboding death.I have studied how depictions of disease have evolved from the 1950s onward, and how the need for personal disease narratives, often containing elements of metaphysical thought and metaphors of illness, is steadily increasing in our modern biomedical world, where disease and death have become institutionalized.