A Review of: Anne Boyer’s The Undying

Format: 320 pp., hardcover; Size: 5.25″ x 7.5″; Price: $26.00; Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Deceased Women Mentioned in the First Chapter: 13; Number of Works by Author Listed on Wikipedia: nine; Number of Ancient Greek Rhetoricians in the Book: one; Best Blurb: “Anne Boyer’s unflinching account of the market-driven brutality of American cancer care sits beside some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read.” Representative Passage: “Just as no one is born outside of history, no one dies a natural death. Death never quits, is both universal and not. It is distributed in disproportion, arrives by drone strikes and guns and husbands’ hands, is carried on the tiny backs of hospital-bred microbes, circulated in the storms raised by the new capitalist weather, arrives through a whisper of radiation instructing the mutation of a cell. It both cares who we are, and it doesn’t.”

Central Question: How can a writer tell a story about breast cancer in a way that admits not only her own narrative, but a politics of collective action—a deeper history?

Anne Boyer is a poet-cum-political economist, a master who studies women’s work and excels at describing the mental knots and material calculations that late-stage capitalist America creates for its poor and marginalized citizens. In books like the prose-poetry memoir Garments Against Women and the experimental essay collection A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, Boyer interrogates what it means to survive in the American heartland as a woman, mother, and artist. Her writing reminds us that the fact that American women are sick, tired, overworked, underpaid, and dying at extraordinary rates in the United States is a historically constructed condition rather than a failure of self-will or determination.

She continues this project in her latest book of essayistic prose, The Undying. We might call The Undying a breast-cancer memoir; it might be more accurately described as a poet’s attempt to analyze the pernicious cultural fictions that accompany breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in the public imagination. Unlike a memoirist, Boyer does not tell a story. Her work of critique privileges metaphor in conveying its message, and it aspires to literature, not testimony. Literature, as some writers, including the poet Carolyn Forché and the philosopher John Dewey, argue, does not represent experience, but creates it. Like Boyer’s previous books, The Undying uses literature itself as a space to ask: What happens when literature is not, following Aristotle, an imitation of “men in...