The Undying, Anne Boyer
The Undying, Anne Boyer
1 Rating(s)
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

The Undying
Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

Author: Anne Boyer

Narrator: Amy Finegan

Unabridged: 5 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/17/2019


Synopsis

Award-winning poet and essayist Anne Boyer delivers a one-of-a-kind meditation on illness in the age of data?sharing her true story of coping with cancer, both the illness and the industry, in The Undying. A 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mary on May 13, 2020

A beautifully written book. Well deserving of the Pulitzer.......more

Goodreads review by But_i_thought_ on December 14, 2020

Winner of the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction 2020 In 2014, at the age of 41, poet and essayist Anne Boyer is diagnosed with cancer. Not just that, but a particularly aggressive form of necrotic breast cancer with uncertain odds of survival. Added to that: She is a single mother, living in the States, no sa......more