Undying

Undying

"The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." ?Sally Rooney, author of Normal People"Anne Boyer?s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." ?Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka SchoolA week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ?dolorists,? the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ?pink ribbon culture? while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others. A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious. Includes black-and-white illustrations Review PRAISE FOR THE UNDYING "The pink ribbon, that ubiquitous emblem of breast cancer awareness, has long been an object of controversy and derision, but the poet and essayist Anne Boyer doesn?t just pull it loose, unfastening its dainty loop; she feeds it through a shredder and lights it on fire, incinerating its remains . . . [in her] extraordinary and furious new book." ?Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times"Boyer?s book, ambitious in scope, is honed to a precision that feels hard-won. The politics of illness?how the profit motive determines life and damage and death; how victim blaming is enshrined; how social norms can disable and kill?have rarely been limned with such clarity and grace." ?Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine "[A] rousing hybrid of memoir and manifesto . . . [The Undying] is memoir as anti-capitalist indictment, as biting cultural criticism, as vengeance. It suggests a new era in the politics of breast cancer, one that might look less like corporate sponsored marathons every October and more like the radical, confrontational AIDS activism of the 1980s. Arriving the year before an election that could set healthcare and disability policy for decades, The Undying warns us of the human costs of any system that prioritizes profit over lives." ?Sascha Cohen, NPR "So much of what Boyer writes here is crucial to any contemporary discussion of disease, pain, care, and capitalism. Her work goes far beyond a memoir of her diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, into profound considerations of the politics of suffering any disease or being in any kind of pain under capitalism, and particularly under voracious for-profit private medicine. Boyer is not only a deeply intelligent thinker, but she is also an extraordinary writer. The Undying gives an astonishingly moving and terrifying account of her own experience and gives language and feeling to the political, cultural, and social elements of an ever-present disease." ?Katie