The New York Times Reviews Anne Boyer's The Undying

Jennifer Szalai reviews Anne Boyer's new book, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness (FSG, 2019), for the New York Times. "Boyer’s extraordinary and furious new book, 'The Undying,' is partly a memoir of her illness, diagnosed five years ago; she was 41 years old when she learned that the lump in her breast was triple-negative cancer, one of the deadliest kinds," writes Szalai. "But her story, told with searing specificity, is just one narrative thread in a book that reflects on the possibility — or necessity — of finding common cause in individual suffering." More from this review:

...[She] tells us not just what she feels but also what she thinks: about women and “sororal death,” overtreatment and the “ruinous carcinogenosphere.” She lives in one of the richest countries in the world, yet the hospital considered her double mastectomy an outpatient procedure, evicting her from the recovery ward before she could stand up. She had to return to work 10 days after her surgery and give a lecture on Walt Whitman with drainage bags stitched to her chest.

Reading [Audre] Lorde’s description of spending five days in the hospital after the removal of a breast, Boyer admits to feeling “sometimes envious of the horrible circumstances of the past because they are at least differently horrible and differently degraded than our era’s own.” Some new kinds of degradation are so tied to technological change that they would have been completely unfathomable before. In 2014, in a pledge to raise “awareness” in partnership with the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation, the fossil-fuels company Baker Hughes produced a thousand pink drill bits to be used in hydraulic fracturing — even though chemicals released by fracking have been linked to cancer.

Where Boyer finds a measure of hope is in pain — not in valorizing it (insufficient), or in conquering it (impossible), but in recognizing it as something that’s real and shared with others. “Pain was my body being reasonable,” she writes...

Read on at the NYT.