The Undying

“I do not want to tell the story of cancer in the way that I have been taught to tell it,” Anne Boyer writes about halfway through her memoir. “The way I have been taught to tell the story is a person would be diagnosed, treated, either live or die. If she lives, she will be heroic. If she dies, she will be a plot point…”

Subtitled “Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care,” Boyer’s The Undying is a miraculous work. After being diagnosed with breast cancer at age 41, and undergoing a brutal chemotherapy process, Boyer wrote this book, tearing apart healthcare in America, the culture around those who have cancer, and more.

I love this opening line from the NYT Book Review about the memoir: “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.

There were so many passages I bookmarked and so many sentences I read over, wanting to cherish how smart they were. And while this alone is not the marker of a great book – Boyer’s incisive look at the industry around cancer, through her poetic and feminist lens, is remarkable.

For example: she really dislikes the word “survival” and the term “survivor".” Why, she explains: “I don’t want to suggest in any way that those who die died because they were weak or died because they’d done something wrong. [The survivor framing] turns the entire world into some sort of sports game in which there are winners and losers. I hate sports. I hope we can develop a new language for it, one that would give adequate form to the complexity of our experience.”

A worthwhile read. Rating: ★★★★★

Get it here: https://amzn.to/3931b9U