The Undying

Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

By: Anne Boyer

Narrated by: Amy Finegan

Award-winning poet and essayist Anne Boyer delivers a one-of-a-kind meditation on illness in the age of data - sharing her true story of coping with cancer, both the illness and the industry, in The Undying.

A week after her 41st 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 21st-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.

©2019 Anne Boyer (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Unexpectedly fantastic!

This is some of the best writing I’ve seen/heard in a long time. Even with things I can far from relate to, it kept me engaged and informed cover to cover. I’m already recommending this to people who want to understand more about cancer and even women’s health equity. Super good.

STOP DOING ACCENTS

who told amy finegan that in the year of our lord 2023, it is okay to put on an awful british accent simply to read a few quotes in a book of prose poetry. Its actually pretty well read but given how frequently boyer quotes john donne, my pleasant listening experience is just as frequently interrupted by a white american woman attempting to mimic a british accent which deserves zero stars for authenticity!

beautifully written but without insight

Boyer defends "telling" as righteous but reveals its limitations, resulting in a tightly controlled narrative.

Simply Beautiful Prose Poetry Delivers Antidote

And i am healed without shame

There's an alchemy...the erudition of honest words, a voice-diffused balm and an elegant iteration which heals even someone as poisoned and mutilated as me.

There arevvictim rage montage.
It's absolute clarity in book form. Rage is therecif

These words contain gifts, renewable, endless gifts, - rel00
... i didn't realize that my life was ending so horribly because i was twisting myself into the role of circus freak. This book cradles the walking dead and reminds us, not to agitate but to calm, that something really shitty is part o&

Provocative and moving

This memoir is about lives and bodies, living and dying. I found it powerful and appreciated especially the form.