The Undying
by Anne Boyer
Summary
Anne Boyer was a single mother living paycheck to paycheck, a week past her forty first birthday, when she was diagnosed with aggressive triple negative breast cancer, and The Undying is her account of the treatment that followed, written as a hybrid of memoir and essay rather than as a conventional illness narrative moving from diagnosis to recovery. Boyer describes chemotherapy with the drugs cyclophosphamide and doxorubicin, a double mastectomy, and returning to teach a class on Walt Whitman only ten days after surgery with surgical drains still attached to her body, details rendered without sentimentality and without the uplift that illness memoirs often reach for.
Around that personal account, Boyer builds a wider argument about what she calls the intersection of social class and medical care, examining how much of the experience of cancer treatment in the United States, the cost, the access, the labor of caring for oneself while sick, depends on resources unevenly distributed across a healthcare system built on profit. She draws on literature, art history and her own reading widely across other writers' accounts of illness to interrogate the cultural mythology that turns cancer patients into either warriors or victims, categories she finds equally false to the actual, often boring or humiliating texture of treatment.
Reading The Undying means encountering fragmented, aphoristic chapters that move between the intensely personal and the openly political without much transition, closer to a collection of linked essays than to a single continuous story. It suits a reader who wants an account of serious illness that refuses easy comfort and insists on naming the economic and social structures surrounding a diagnosis usually treated as purely medical.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board named Anne Boyer's The Undying, published in September 2019 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a co winner of the 2020 Prize for General Nonfiction, sharing the award with Greg Grandin's The End of the Myth. It was also a finalist for the PEN, Jean Stein Book Award. Jennifer Szalai, reviewing the book in The New York Times, called it extraordinary and furious, while NPR's Sascha Cohen described it as functioning at once as anti capitalist indictment and as biting cultural criticism.
The Times Literary Supplement's Anna Picard called it a rare literary response to breast cancer, distinguishing it from the more common genre of illness memoir the book itself pushes back against. Boyer, primarily a poet before The Undying, has continued to write across genres since, and the book is now frequently taught alongside Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor as a later, more explicitly political entry in the same tradition of writing critically about how illness gets narrated.