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When writing does not result from an injunction to produce a normative text, it can have the value of supporting thought-processes by putting what is unrepresentable into words. In the field of serious illness, and more particularly of cancerology, the issue of making sense of the “illness-event” through its historicization raises questions about the relationship to the elaboration of the trauma in an autobiographical text. Likewise, literature provides us with a certain number of works whose subject is cancer, whether in an autobiographical or fictional form.We will thus try, through both testimonies and literature, to think about this difficulty of initiating a process of putting into words that acknowledges the violence of serious illness – a process that can sometimes be poeticized or at least serve as a support for literary creativity. With distinctions but also areas of intersection, we will examine the place of language and of “saying” at the basis of human experience, and particularly when it is put to the test by the experience of illness.