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 genre-defying memoir , Ms. Boyer, now 46, chronicles her struggle to survive not just the disease, but a brutal chemotherapy regime." — The New York Times 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 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." —Katie Da Cunha Lewin, Jezebel precise and comprehensive, intimate and philosophical; its self-awareness is so rigorous it feels almost extravagant. It’s hard to imagine how she made this book, so near to the agony it documents. Like Lorde, like Susan Sontag, this writer enters the hell of cancer with a practice of lucidity that somehow endures through lucidity’s excruciating loss. " —Hilary Plum, Los Angeles Review of Books The Undying is the spellbinding result of a brilliant mind confined to the sickbed, facing the destruction of her body and her routine life . . . What Boyer and her breast cancer have in common is a brutally frank articulation of what festers in silence and sublimation . They are both hell-raisers." —Natasha Boyd, Los Angeles Review of Books The Undying . . . is told with the exhilarating acuity that her other writing would lead you to expect; it’s hurtful and delirious to read . . . Pain is said to be the most isolating thing, but Anne Boyer has put the whole world in here ." —Marina Vishmidt, Artforum Best of 2019 Boyer lets the first person and cancer rattle each other, cheek by jowl . . . [her] real subject becomes the several varieties of precarity (social, economic, artistic) that cancer swiftly unobscures, rather than the cancer itself. This moves The Undying from the canon of the illness memoir or illness sociology into the newly burgeoning subgenre of accounts of mass indenture and debt." — Laura Kolbe, The Yale Review beautiful memoir about her battle with breast cancer . . . [The Undying ] puts into sharp focus the economic toll cancer takes on women of limited means . . . and is stacked with revelatory observations . . . Boyer’s gorgeous language elevates this artful , piercing narrative well above the average medical memoir." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)Call it a battle cry, call it a fury-fueled elegy, call it the work of a woman who will not be denied. In every way, The Undying should not be missed ." —Colleen Mondor, Booklist (starred review)memoir and meditation on . . . illness shines with the startling lines of a poet, the hard-won insight of a patient, and the deep awareness of the fragility and tenacity of our bodies. It deserves to be called a classic ." —Stephen Sparks, Literary Hub Maybe . . . the story of her adaptation can be converted into a resource for yours ." —Lauren Berlant, 4Columns "The Undying is an examination of how to write (or not) about breast cancer and at the same time an elegant, devastating example of such writing." —Sarah Resnick, Bookforum The Undying is] a passionate and eloquent memoir about one woman's battle with breast cancer . . . [Boyer] takes us on a deeply personal journey into 'my body in pain,' 'eviscerating sadness,' and profound loss . . . Told with brutal clarity, this is a haunting testimony about death that is filled with life ." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)The Undying is an unforgettable artifact of physical suffering that refuses the myopic individualism of classic cancer narratives. " —Liz Bowen, Public Books Brock Wilbur, The Pitch (Kansas City) —Dan Lybarger, The Pitch (Kansas City) — The Morning Sun ( Pittsburgh Kansas) The Undying is the pink ribbon's undoingnear death and not-dying with a transfixing lust for life, drawing upon the cancer writings of Sontag, Lorde and Acker, as well as the accounts of YouTube vloggers, to construct this astonishingly generous work about her illness and the world's . It's a very important book ." —Johanna Fateman A classic —a book that expands in all directions to fill an empty space in the literature of illness. I have long thought of Boyer as a genius against genius, speaking from the sea of people in a voice that cannot help but be heard above the others, it is so clear and strong . And The Undying is a book that is beautifully against: against cancer, against easy metaphors, above all against 'the pink ribbon on the for-sale sign on the mansion.'" —Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy —Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears Anne Boyer is an essential voice , and this is an essential book: one body's urgent attempt at finding a language to tell us what it knows." —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude
Boyer's extraordinary and furious new book, The Undying, is partly a memoir of her illness…But her story, told with searing specificity, is just one narrative thread in a book that reflects on the possibility—or necessity—of finding common cause in individual suffering.
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
★ 06/10/2019
Poet Boyer (Garments Against Women ) returns with a beautiful memoir about her battle with breast cancer. The book covers Boyer’s 2014 diagnosis at age 41, her grueling chemotherapy treatments, and her double mastectomy, delving into the fear, suffering, and loneliness that cancer brings. Cancer makes “the boundaries of our bodies break,” Boyer writes. “Everything we were supposed to keep inside of us now seems to fall out.... We can’t stop crying. We emit foul odors. We throw up.” Boyer criticizes the “capitalist medical universe” in which women are given “drive-through mastectomies,” and she puts into sharp focus the economic toll cancer takes on women of limited means. A single mother with no savings, Boyer had to return to her teaching job 10 days after her surgery because her medical leave had run out; she was so weak that friends had to carry her books. This memoir lays bare Boyer’s pain and exhaustion and is stacked with revelatory observations: “There is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed,” she writes, “how it falls so quickly from the place we make love to the place we might die in.” Boyer’s gorgeous language elevates this artful, piercing narrative well above the average medical memoir. (Sept.)
★ 2019-06-09
Award-winning poet and essayist Boyer (Creative Writing/Kansas City Art Institute; A Handbook of Disappointed Fate , 2018, etc.), a single mother living on a tight budget, was diagnosed with highly aggressive breast cancer when she was 41. Her doctor (who she later replaced) said her tumor was "necrotic, which meant that it was growing so quickly it failed to build infrastructure for itself." He recommended chemotherapy right away. Her treatment with Neulasta cost $7,000 per shot. As the author writes, "someone once said that choosing chemotherapy is like choosing to jump off a building when someone is holding a gun to your head." Boyer looked for guidance and inspiration from other women artists who suffered from the disease, including Susan Sontag, Alice James, Rachel Carson, Audre Lorde, Fanny Burney, Kathy Acker, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Boyer kept a journal, a "minor form of reparative magic," which she abandoned hundreds of times. John Donne's "sickbed masterpiece," Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions , written when he thought he was dying, casts an influential shadow over her book. Both have complex structures and are highly meditative, but Boyer's "exercise in lamentation" is secular where Donne's was religious. She takes us on a deeply personal journey into "my body in pain," "eviscerating sadness," and profound loss—eyelashes, eyebrows, toenails, nerves, brain cells, her hair. "I like wigs," she writes. "I wear wigs. People I like wear wigs. Dolly Parton wears wigs….Medusa wore a wig made of snakes." Eventually, Boyer had a double mastectomy. "In the capitalist medical universe in which all bodies must orbit around profit at all times," she writes, "even a double mastectomy is considered an outpatient procedure." She learned that everyone lies, from pharmaceutical companies to doctors and researchers and the internet. "Now that I am undying," she writes, "the world is full of possibility."
Told with brutal clarity, this is a haunting testimony about death that is filled with life.
