Laura Marris Reviews Anne Boyer's The Undying

At On the Seawall, Laura Marris writes about Anne Boyer's latest, "brilliant" (Marris's words, though we agree with the sentiment) volume, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care (FSG). The book "refuses the slogan fuck cancer and any of the typical pink-ribbon euphemisms that accompany it," writes Marris. "Instead, Boyer offers a truer slogan, one that, she admits, is too long to put on a hat: fuck white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenisphere." From there: 

Boyer’s slogan places cancer back where it has always been — among us and inside of us — rather than at the remove of a tragedy happening to someone else, somewhere else, a bad fortune that we hope to be spared. When she starts to receive books about cancer in the mail, she writes, “But I am, despite the literature, the sick one, the recipient of all the dying wife stories in the canon of cancer’s accounts. Women’s suffering is generalized into literary opportunity.” In writing her own narrative, not of “survival” but of “undying,” Boyer gives herself the much more difficult task of speaking truth to the power of the grave, writing, as Boyer’s daughter puts it, “inside a living posthumousness.” By ripping the veil off the many ways our society misrepresents cancer, and specifically breast cancer, Boyer creates “a record of the motions of a struggle to know, if not the truth, then the weft of all competing lies.”

This struggle is not for the faint of heart, and many of the contradictions Boyer unravels are designed to reassure, minimize, and compartmentalize, in effect, to isolate cancer away from the rest of life. Hypocrisies in The Undying range from those of the corporate sphere, like the pink-ribbon fracking drills Baker Hughes corporation made in partnership with Susan G. Komen for The Cure, to the social pressures of “stay positive,” to the medical fallacy of an “oncology journey.” Any of these lies, Boyer points out, could be deadly —pink fracking drills release carcinogens into the groundwater, the “trying of the exhausted is fuel for the machine that keeps running them over in the first place,” and Boyer’s first oncologist is himself so afraid of the dangers of oncology that he won’t give her the aggressive chemo she ultimately needs.

Continue reading at On the Seawall.