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 …
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.
Dealing with a close death of my own, I decided to dive into this book and consumed it in two days. sad, sobering, relatable I would be hesitant to recommend it to just anyone but if you are in the right mind state it is a beautiful written work. I really liked the seeming appreciation and hope afforded to friends when in hard places in the final chapter. Friends can make all the difference in hard times.
又一次感受到文字的力量。不再是“积极”的谈论乳腺癌的治疗经历，而是从患者角度出发批判讨论“乳腺癌患者/生存者”这个标签和治疗过程。意料之外的收获大概是医生会过度治疗，药物甚至“lingers but no one yet knows what damage it does.”古希腊神话就算女性死亡，场所也局限于床榻。
The pharmaceutical companies lie. The doctors lie. The sick lie. The healthy lie. The researchers lie. The Internet lies.
lack of access to treatment harms, access to treatment harms; surveillance harms, lack of surveillance harms; researchers fake cures, patients fake cancer, and doctors do, too.
又一次感受到文字的力量。不再是“积极”的谈论乳腺癌的治疗经历，而是从患者角度出发批判讨论“乳腺癌患者/生存者”这个标签和治疗过程。意料之外的收获大概是医生会过度治疗，药物甚至“lingers but no one yet knows what damage it does.”古希腊神话就算女性死亡，场所也局限于床榻。
The pharmaceutical companies lie. The doctors lie. The sick lie. The healthy lie. The researchers lie. The Internet lies.
lack of access to treatment harms, access to treatment harms; surveillance harms, lack of surveillance harms; researchers fake cures, patients fake cancer, and doctors do, too.
