The Undying by Anne Boyer

The Undying by Anne Boyer

WINER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION

The Undying 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 Normal People

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. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique. --Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School

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.

Includes black-and-white illustrations

Boyer, Anne: - Anne Boyer is a poet who lives in Kansas. She is the author of A HANDBOOK OF DISAPPOINTED FATE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), GARMENTS AGAINST WOMEN (Ahsahta Press, 2015), and THE ROMANCE OF HAPPY WORKERS (Coffee House Press, 2008).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781250757982
ISBN 10	1250757983
Title	The Undying
Author	Anne Boyer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Picador USA
Year published	2020-09-08
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable