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A review by joanaprneves
The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness by Anne Boyer
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
3.25
I don’t know why this book wasn’t for me. It almost seems unjust to rate it as it is such a raw and beautifully delivered experience. Anne Boyer manages to share her cancer diagnosis and subsequent fall from grace (good health) in a way that doesn’t quite feel like a passage from a pathological state to a healthy one. Her kind of breast cancer is the most agressive and untreatable one, which leaves her at the mercy of a particular kind of calousness of the capitalist American system, and both to an illness and a cure that never really go away even if the cancer clears and she survives. She explores the grey area of an almost-death and a cruel cure where, almost unbelievably, there is a prescribed norm for pain, length of disease and treatment, etc.
This undiluted account is painful and gut-wrenching to read. There are many passages to love and highlight and re-read.
I guess I was perhaps expecting another form of writing. There are a lot of x is y, rather than a descriptive or immersive kind of account. It feels like a balance, delivered in aphorisms at times, rather than a book written with the reader in mind. The author says so herself: this is a book for the sick. She also implies that we have either been there or will be there but her kind of suffering is specific to a kind of cancer (and gendered cancer on top of it). So, it also means that this is a slice of reality that exposes the failings of capitalism and a society that can only understand clear-cut situations. So no, it is not only for the sick. However, this being a painful lived experience the rage is palpable but it does not always makes - for me - a great read. I do recommend it though because it is highly perceptive and an important topic. I suspect that this was not the right moment for me to read it I guess.
This undiluted account is painful and gut-wrenching to read. There are many passages to love and highlight and re-read.
I guess I was perhaps expecting another form of writing. There are a lot of x is y, rather than a descriptive or immersive kind of account. It feels like a balance, delivered in aphorisms at times, rather than a book written with the reader in mind. The author says so herself: this is a book for the sick. She also implies that we have either been there or will be there but her kind of suffering is specific to a kind of cancer (and gendered cancer on top of it). So, it also means that this is a slice of reality that exposes the failings of capitalism and a society that can only understand clear-cut situations. So no, it is not only for the sick. However, this being a painful lived experience the rage is palpable but it does not always makes - for me - a great read. I do recommend it though because it is highly perceptive and an important topic. I suspect that this was not the right moment for me to read it I guess.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer, Death, Panic attacks/disorders, Terminal illness, Medical content, and Medical trauma