“I didn’t know anything about having cancer,” Anne Boyer writes in her challenging new book The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness, “but I knew something about how to avoid telling a story.” There is, as Audre Lorde explained in The Cancer Journals, a curious silence around cancer. The silence doesn’t come from not talking, but is instead produced by how the disease is supposed to be spoken about. In her new memoir, Boyer does not narrate the experience of cancer, writing that “cancer’s near-criminal myth of singularity means any work about it always resembles testimony.” Instead, Boyer illuminates both the deep personal trauma of the disease and its inextricable link with the indignities of living under a rapacious capitalism that demands happy and healthy participation from the citizens it overwhelms: “Disease is never neutral. Treatment never not ideological. Morality never without its politics.” Through her uniquely penetrating perspective, Boyer’s text is a paradigm-shifting work that asserts that the life of the body can (and should) never be divorced from the political landscape in which it moves.
“I didn’t know anything about having cancer,” Anne Boyer writes in her challenging new book, “but I knew something about how to avoid telling a story.” There is, as Audre Lorde explained in, a curious silence around cancer. The silence doesn’t come from not talking, but is instead produced by how the disease is supposed to be spoken about.
Boyer’s work continues this emphasis on care and solidarity, and the politics of care are the crux around which the rest of the book turns. Though she worries about “cashing in” on care before she old and after she is young, those ages in which we understand everyday care to be a necessary part of everyday life, Boyer also notes that sickness is not rare nor is it singular.
In her consideration of the treatment of cancer as part of a gendered hierarchy, Boyer also considers the problems of treating the disease as a personal struggle. Cancer, patients are told, must be aggressively fought, and with traditional treatments. Boyer takes the case of the writer Kathy Acker as an example of the fury that cancer sufferers are met with if they go down “non-normative routes,” specifically, in her case, refusing to undergo aggressive chemotherapy.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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