I want to start by being perfectly honest: it has been several years since I've engaged with this level of critical analysis, and I listened to this audiobook very quickly over the course of two workdays. I've already decided that I will need to reread it again in the future and that I definitely did not understand all of it.

What I did understand, however, was very good. Sontag's overarching thesis - that metaphorizing illness leads to moralization, which inevitably leads to stigma against the ill - made a lot of sense to me, even before she whipped out her copious evidence. I didn't realize the degree to which cancer used to be stigmatized; my mother had breast cancer in 2017, and from what I could tell, her experience was quite different from Sontag's experiences/observations - although, with Sontag's assistance, I can see the echos of that stigma today (especially in the combative metaphors that still fly around cancer - "survivor," "lost a long battle," etc.). The thread of the military metaphor into the AIDS conversation was thus probably the easiest for me to follow. 

I can't help but wonder what Sontag would've had to say, had she lived to see the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. I have a feeling she would've been the rhetorical equivalent of that one Oprah gif where Oprah looks at the camera knowingly and shrugs like, "What did I tell you?"