Hilary Plum Reviews Anne Boyer's The Undying

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Hilary Plum reads Anne Boyer's memoir about her path from cancer to remission, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care. Placing Boyer's latest volume within the context of her previous titles, like, Garments Against Women, as well as within the context of pre-existing cancer narratives, Plum notes that Boyer's "writing is precise and comprehensive, intimate and philosophical; its self-awareness is so rigorous it feels almost extravagant. " From there: 

It’s hard to imagine how she made this book, so near to the agony it documents. Like Lorde, like Susan Sontag, this writer enters the hell of cancer with a practice of lucidity that somehow endures through lucidity’s excruciating loss.

Yet Boyer would refuse the heroism that description implies, as she refuses “the angel of epiphany” that readers want from “the story of cancer.” She’s right. We need writers of illness to challenge our fears and desires, what we want cancer’s excessive suffering and immoderate treatment to mean — how we want this horror to be redeemed by personal transcendence, something a pink ribbon could signify. “I have always hated every shade of the heroic, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never had that look,” she writes, then tries to show us how mortal suffering is common, how it’s exactly our shared condition, not something that lets us transcend commonality. She’s skeptical toward the specialness, the proof of individual worth, that illness stories often seem to express, even when this isn’t their writers’ intention. Illness is a means to know how very ordinary, not how extraordinary, we are:

The common struggle gets pushed through the sieve of what forms we have to make its account, and before you know it, the wide and shared suffering of this world is narrowed and gossamer, as thin as silk and looking as special as the language it takes to tell it. […]

But I was a single mother without savings who existed in a world of profit, had no partner to care for me or family nearby in a world that privatizes survival, had to work all through my treatment at a job where I was advised to never let on I was ill, had never had wealth or been proximate to the seats of power. In other words, my cancer, like almost anyone else’s, was ordinary, as was, apart from my practice of writing, my life.

In his foundational work on illness narratives, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Arthur Frank describes and critiques the dynamics of what he calls the “restitution narrative.” In this familiar plot, a sick person gets well and is restored to society and to their social responsibilities.

Continue reading at LARB.