This brilliant book, written after Anne Boyer was diagnosed with aggressive, triple-negative breast cancer at the age of forty-one, refuses the slogan fuck cancer and any of the typical pink-ribbon euphemisms that accompany it. Instead, Boyer offers a truer slogan, one that, she admits, is too long to put on a hat: fuck white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s ruinous carcinogenisphere.
Boyer’s slogan places cancer back where it has always been — among us and inside of us — rather than at the remove of a tragedy happening to someone else, somewhere else, a bad fortune that we hope to be spared. When she starts to receive books about cancer in the mail, she writes, “But I am, despite the literature, the sick one, the recipient of all the dying wife stories in the canon of cancer’s accounts. Women’s suffering is generalized into literary opportunity.” In writing her own narrative, not of “survival” but of “undying,” Boyer gives herself the much more difficult task of speaking truth to the power of the grave, writing, as Boyer’s daughter puts it, “inside a living posthumousness.” By ripping the veil off the many ways our society misrepresents cancer, and specifically breast cancer, Boyer creates “a record of the motions of a struggle to know, if not the truth, then the weft of all competing lies.”
This struggle is not for the faint of heart, and many of the contradictions Boyer unravels are designed to reassure, minimize, and compartmentalize, in effect, to isolate cancer away from the rest of life. Hypocrisies in The Undying range from those of the corporate sphere, like the pink-ribbon fracking drills Baker Hughes corporation made in partnership with Susan G. Komen for The Cure, to the social pressures of “stay positive,” to the medical fallacy of an “oncology journey.” Any of these lies, Boyer points out, could be deadly —pink fracking drills release carcinogens into the groundwater, the “trying of the exhausted is fuel for the machine that keeps running them over in the first place,” and Boyer’s first oncologist is himself so afraid of the dangers of oncology that he won’t give her the aggressive chemo she ultimately needs.
If you’ve ever helped to care for someone with cancer, you will recognize in this book the answers to lingering questions that never felt right, and the great luck of having friends who are willing to participate in art-making, bullshit-detecting, and black humor. I found myself writing YES! over and over in the margins, both at moments of revelation, and at moments when Boyer and her friends occupy cancer-land with the impulses of art. They tie medical bills to a fake skeleton and drown them in a lake. They stuff prayer cards into the box at the cancer pavilion that say Please pray for American poetry. They send Boyer cannabis popcorn wrapped in Diane di Prima’s yoga pants. And instead of “stay positive,” Boyer proposes lines from di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #9”: “1. Kill the head of dow chemical / 2. destroy plant/ 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM to build again.
Boyer also brings the insight of her art to bear on the cancer treatments themselves, unveiling the history of the chemotherapy drugs she is given:
“Cyclophosphamide is a medicalized form of a chemical weapon once manufactured by Bayer under the term LOST. Mustard gas, as it is known, has always done its worst as an incapacitant rather than a killer, but it can kill a person, too. During the war, LOST filled the trenches with brilliant yellow plumes. During cancer, it comes in plastic pouches, and no one in the pavilion speaks frankly about what it is.”
Boyer views the costs of these drugs in a social, environmental, and political sense, even as they circulate in her bloodstream. After one infusion, she finds herself “a person in thrift store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” These treatments and their causes become to seem cyclical, to blur — weapons that release toxins into the environment are harnessed to make medicines that are flushed back into the environment, and someone always profits. Patients find themselves harnessed in the cycle, or as one nurse unforgettably puts it, “it takes a wolf to catch a wolf.”
There are so many sharp and fiercely specific moments in this book, but I don’t want to overlook the significance of its form. Boyer’s work has a way of making individual experience less lonely, and the very structure of this book presents an alternative to the rarefied, isolating spaces of cancer care. Before and after the pavilion, Boyer introduces the more communal architecture of temples where the suffering can go to find relief that is both collective and individual. The chapter “In the Temple of Giulietta Masina’s Tears” describes Boyer’s initial wish to build a temple for public weeping, a space that would offer “pain’s sufferers the exquisite comforts of stately public marble troughs in which to collectivize their tears.” After a chemotherapy drug makes her weep uncontrollably, all the time, she realizes she has already embodied this project:
“I cried every minute, whether I was sad or not, my self a mobile, embarrassed, public monument of tears. I didn’t need to build there temple for weeping, then, having been one. I’ve just always hated it when anyone suffers alone.”
In the name of collectivizing suffering, Boyer has done the remarkable work of translating her self-as-monument into this monument-as-book. Reading The Undying feels like inhabiting the kind of temple Boyer once wanted to create — a temple for the individual and public acknowledgement of suffering, and also a temple for collectively examining the lies she sets out to untangle. This work is a powerful antidote to “anti-sadness reactionaries” and the private interests that seek to keep the actualities of cancer patients and cancer treatment out of the public mind.
In the aftermath of her illness, a friend tells Boyer that at the worst moments, she needed art, not comfort. Every sentence of this book has something to say, under pain of death, about the truths artistic excellence can unleash. If this work doesn’t always provide comfort, it at least offers a choice. As Boyer puts it: “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.”
I’m so grateful she chose to write.
[Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on September 17, 2019, 320 pages, $26.00 hardcover]