Anne Boyer: The Undying

Anne Boyer's The Undying is an impossible memoir written from the standpoint of a 'living posthumousness'. Diagnosed with a highly aggressive form of breast cancer at age 41, the book is an unflinching account of Boyer's experience of a life-threatening illness and th eequally devastating treatment, aggravated by her social and economic conditions as a single mother with no savings. The Undying is, in part, a testimony and, in part, as the subtitle reads, a 'meditation' on the gendered disease of breast cancer under capitalism: its costly and ecologically harmful treatment and the incredible profits harvested from sick bodies by the medical-industrial complex. It is also a fierce intervention in the literary conventions of medical memoirs. Firmly rejecting the rhetorics of survival that typically characterise such narratives, Boyer pursues a form of telling that will not end up turning her story into 'a lie in the service of the way things are'. This formal search, which, as she writes, constitutes the 'motor and fury' of the book, is not merely a literary concern, but 'the record of the motions of the struggle to know'.

While comprising formally hybrid fragments - including literary digressions, subversive communiqués, exercises in lamentation, lists of unfinished aphorisms, 'clinic fables', 'onco-surrealist fantasies' and more - The Undying follows the chronological skeleton of illness's medical progression: from diagnosis and prognosis to chemotherapy and surgery, all the way through to the unending aftermath of the disabling effects of treatment. Foregrounding the impersonal violence of medical science, Boyer describes how her body was scanned and turned...