Freedman always enjoyed the look and feel of a empty fancy notebook: “It looks like whatever you put in it will be good.” So he came up with the idea to fill it up incrementally with "a kind of Bruce Chatwin-like travelogue through the strange foreign country of illness.”

He already had experimented with this kind of diary format. “First I wrote 100 short stories in 100 days after inventing a simple system for producing random plot lines,” Freedman said. “Then I wrote a novel by completing exactly three pages a day. Then a screen play, then another novel, then 50 short stories in 50 days. Another novel, a sitcom, a novel in 72 hours of straight writing. I usually wrote these things when I was frustrated with my visual work, which I can see now was very often.”

He showed these books to almost no one, suspecting they weren’t any good. “After one or two lukewarm responses,” Freedman said, “I would drill holes through the manuscripts and bolt them inside other sculptures, making them literary cadavers. I was an experimental writer trapped in the body of a would-be hack. I really didn’t expect anything more from the journal.”

Because the story about his treatment was more tangible than his “normal angst cycles,” Freedman presumed it might be easier for a reader to get through it than his earlier writing, “but I really was drawn to the project merely to once again have the satisfaction of filling a book up and making a world for myself.” After treatment, Freedman made the journal into a gallery installation, the dealer Larry Goldberg offered to make a limited edition of it for a solo exhibition, “and that’s when it began to evolve as a public project.”

The journal’s detailing of his radiation and other treatments is pretty relentless, but there are detours on those days Freedman found nothing interesting to report. “Often in the book when I leave the narrative to recount personal memories it is because I want to give some context to the story of treatment,” he said. “Often, though, it was a relief to escape from the present into an old story, so the line between the calculated and the spontaneous is blurry and was crossed many times in both directions.”

Sometimes, he added, the most self-conscious contents came out of a weird, desperate attempt at maintaining standards of normalcy: “Knowing I was dwelling on my personal problems while Hurricane Sandy was making life miserable for millions and wars were raging all over the world made me want to mention them in my book to show myself, if no one else, that I still had some fellow feeling and humanity left in me.”

The frenetic quality of the handwriting and the quick drawing style suggest a large emotional unloading. Yet Freedman said that in some way it was the opposite: “The quicker the drawing and handwriting, the less emotional I was while working. When I started out I thought the book would be a bit of a lark and that I would flit around from subject to subject as I worked to fill my quota of pages. The drawings on the early pages are looser and the writing even sloppier and larger that it became later, mostly because I was just fooling around.” As the treatment began to take its toll on him, however, Freedman’s mood darkened and the pages tightened up—they “got more squashed and dense and filled with not missing anything important.”

He would not start working until very late at night and could not go to bed without all the pages done. “Midnight is a good time to think bleakly about cancer and its consequences,” he noted. “The days when I wrote late at night he pages look pretty whiny and humorless now. Sometimes I just wrote out all my worries in one fell swoop and went to bed, relieved at least that I had done one positive thing for the day, even if it was just to complain. So that was cathartic, if not particularly artful.”