{"product_id":"9780374279349","title":"The Undying : Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor(s): Anne Boyer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself.\" —Sally Rooney, author of \u003ci\u003eNormal People\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. \u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique.\" —Ben Lerner, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Topeka School\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA twenty-first-century \u003ci\u003eIllness as Metaphor\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, \u003ci\u003eThe Undying \u003c\/i\u003eexplores 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA genre-bending memoir in the tradition of \u003ci\u003eThe Argonauts\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIncludes black-and-white illustrations\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReview(s):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003ePRAISE FOR \u003ci\u003eTHE UNDYING\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eThe pink ribbon\u003c\/b\u003e, 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] \u003cb\u003eextraordinary and furious\u003c\/b\u003e new book.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eJennifer Szalai,\u003ci\u003e The New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"At the time of her diagnosis with an aggressive form of breast cancer, the poet Anne Boyer was 41 and a single parent. In her \u003cb\u003egenre-defying memoir\u003c\/b\u003e, Ms. Boyer, now 46, chronicles her struggle to survive not just the disease, but a brutal chemotherapy regime.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Boyer’s book, ambitious in scope, is \u003cb\u003ehoned to a precision that feels hard-won\u003c\/b\u003e. \u003cb\u003eThe politics of illness\u003c\/b\u003e—how the profit motive determines life and damage and death; how victim blaming is enshrined; how social norms can disable and kill—\u003cb\u003ehave rarely been limned with such clarity and grace\u003c\/b\u003e.\"\u003cb\u003e —Lidija Haas, \u003ci\u003eHarper's Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[A] rousing\u003cb\u003e hybrid of memoir and manifesto\u003c\/b\u003e . . . [\u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e] is\u003cb\u003e memoir as anti-capitalist indictment, as biting cultural criticism, as vengeance\u003c\/b\u003e. 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.\u003cb\u003e Arriving the year before an election that could set healthcare and disability policy for decades, \u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e warns us of the human costs of any system that prioritizes profit over lives\u003c\/b\u003e.\" \u003cb\u003e—Sascha Cohen, NPR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eSo much of what Boyer writes here is crucial to any contemporary discussion of disease, pain, care, and capitalism.\u003c\/b\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eJezebel\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Boyer's] writing is \u003cb\u003eprecise and comprehensive, intimate and philosophical; its self-awareness is so rigorous it feels almost extravagant.\u003c\/b\u003e It’s hard to imagine how she made this book, so near to the agony it documents. \u003cb\u003eLike Lorde, like Susan Sontag,\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003ethis writer enters the hell of cancer with a practice of lucidity that somehow endures through lucidity’s excruciating loss.\u003c\/b\u003e\" —Hilary Plum, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e is \u003cb\u003ethe spellbinding result of a brilliant mind \u003c\/b\u003econfined to the sickbed, facing the destruction of her body and her routine life . . . What Boyer and her breast cancer have in common is \u003cb\u003ea brutally frank articulation of what festers in silence and sublimation\u003c\/b\u003e. They are both hell-raisers.\" —Natasha Boyd, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Anne Boyer’s \u003ci\u003eThe Undying . . . \u003c\/i\u003eis told with the \u003cb\u003eexhilarating acuity\u003c\/b\u003e that her other writing would lead you to expect; it’s hurtful and delirious to read . . .\u003cb\u003e Pain is said to be the most isolating thing, but Anne Boyer has put the whole world in here\u003c\/b\u003e.\" \u003cb\u003e—Marina Vishmidt, \u003ci\u003eArtforum\u003c\/i\u003e Best of 2019\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eBoyer lets the first person and cancer rattle each other, cheek by jowl\u003c\/b\u003e . . . [her] real subject becomes the several varieties of precarity (social, economic, artistic) that cancer swiftly unobscures, rather than the cancer itself. This moves \u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e from the canon of the illness memoir or illness sociology into the newly burgeoning subgenre of accounts of mass indenture and debt.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eLaura Kolbe, \u003ci\u003eThe Yale Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Boyer returns with a \u003cb\u003ebeautiful memoir about her battle with breast cancer \u003c\/b\u003e. . .  [\u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e] puts into sharp focus\u003cb\u003e the economic toll cancer takes on women of limited means\u003c\/b\u003e  . . . and is stacked with \u003cb\u003erevelatory observations\u003c\/b\u003e  . . .  Boyer’s \u003cb\u003egorgeous \u003c\/b\u003elanguage elevates this \u003cb\u003eartful\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003cb\u003epiercing \u003c\/b\u003enarrative well above the average medical memoir.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This elegant and eviscerating memoir . . . cuts like a righteous blade through the familiar bland heroics of the breast cancer 'industry' . . . \u003cb\u003eCall 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Undying \u003c\/i\u003eshould not be missed\u003c\/b\u003e.\" —Colleen Mondor, \u003ci\u003eBooklist \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This \u003cb\u003ememoir and meditation \u003c\/b\u003eon . . . 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. \u003cb\u003eIt deserves to be called a classic\u003c\/b\u003e.\" \u003cb\u003e—Stephen Sparks, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Hub\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Boyer is trying to pick up the junk on the side of the road that might help a future person who doesn’t die from her potentially terminal illness to have something to restart with. So that a future drowning subject has a flotation device that serves as a reality check. \u003cb\u003eMaybe . . . the story of her adaptation can be converted into a resource for yours\u003c\/b\u003e.\"  \u003cb\u003e—Lauren Berlant, \u003ci\u003e4Columns\u003c\/i\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"The Undying\u003c\/i\u003e is\u003cb\u003e an examination of \u003ci\u003ehow\u003c\/i\u003e to write (or not) about breast cancer\u003c\/b\u003e and at the same time an \u003cb\u003eelegant, devastating\u003c\/b\u003e example of such writing.\" —Sarah Resnick, \u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[\u003ci\u003eThe Undying \u003c\/i\u003eis] 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 . . . \u003cb\u003eTold with brutal clarity, this is a haunting testimony about death that is filled with life\u003c\/b\u003e.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Boyer is determined to portray her pain in language, through a stunning and, yes, painful collage of poetic approaches . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Undying \u003c\/i\u003eis \u003cb\u003ean unforgettable artifact of physical suffering that refuses the myopic individualism of classic cancer narratives.\u003c\/b\u003e\" \u003cb\u003e—Liz Bowen, Public Books\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An elegant and unforgettable narrative about the brutality of illness and the capitalism of cancer care in America\" —\u003cb\u003eBrock Wilbur, \u003ci\u003eThe Pitch (Kansas City)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The Undying is an unflinching account of how Boyer has survived a diagnosis of triple negative breast cancer in 2014. It’s mostly memoir but also includes divergences into medicine and history, examining how the condition can be traced back as far as ancient Persia, how grueling both the surgery and chemotherapy can be, how many of the drugs to remedy it are environmentally dangerous, and how industrialization and corporate medicine are part of the problem. There’s a lot going on here, all of it worth your time.\" \u003cb\u003e—Dan Lybarger, \u003ci\u003eThe Pitch (Kansas City)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Boyer’s memoir is written in flowing prose dotted with poetry, history, dark humor and science. Hers is a personal story placed firmly into a wider narrative about how we view breast cancer. She is unflinchingly aware of her book’s place in a culture awash with inspirational stories in which cancer survival is presented as personal triumph.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Morning Sun (\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003ePittsburgh\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e Kansas)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e is the pink ribbon's undoing\u003c\/b\u003e, a methodical and exquisite refusal of the contemporary moral and medical narratives pinned to the sick. Boyer explores \u003cb\u003enear death and not-dying\u003c\/b\u003e 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 \u003cb\u003eastonishingly generous work about her illness and the world's\u003c\/b\u003e. It's \u003cb\u003ea very important book\u003c\/b\u003e.\" \u003cb\u003e—Johanna Fateman\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eA classic\u003c\/b\u003e—a book that expands in all directions to fill an empty space in the literature of illness.\u003cb\u003e 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\u003c\/b\u003e. And \u003ci\u003eThe Undying\u003c\/i\u003e 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.'\"\u003cb\u003e —Patricia Lockwood, author of \u003ci\u003ePriestdaddy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This is a powerful, timely, and troubling book. \u003c\/b\u003eBoyer's unflinching account of the market-driven brutality of American cancer care sits beside some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read.\"\u003cb\u003e —Hari Kunzru, author of \u003ci\u003eWhite Tears\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003cb\u003eAnne Boyer is an essential voice\u003c\/b\u003e, and this is an essential book: one body's urgent attempt at finding a language to tell us what it knows.\u003cb\u003e\" —Jonathan Lethem, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Fortress of Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLong-listed New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year (2019), Winner Pulitzer Prize - Winner (2020)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eISBN:  9780374279349\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":40708873781454,"sku":"9780374279349","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0600\/7029\/7806\/products\/getimage_b994f27e-9f24-4967-962c-aa9094572327.jpg?v=1640665602","url":"https:\/\/pickwickbookshop.com\/products\/9780374279349","provider":"Pickwick Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}