The undying : pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care / Anne Boyer.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019Copyright date: ©2019Edition: First editionDescription: 308 pages ; 20 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780374279349
- 0374279349
| Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book
|
Main Library | NonFiction | 616.9944 B791 | Available | 33111009716032 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION
" The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." --Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
"Anne Boyer's radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." --Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School
A week after her forty-first 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 twenty-first-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.
Includes black-and-white illustrations
Includes bibliographical references.
Prologue -- The incubants -- Birth of the pavilion -- The sick bed -- How the oracle held -- The hoax -- In the temple of Giulietta Masina's tears -- Wasted life -- Deathwatch -- Epilogue / and what it was that saved me.
"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." -- Provided by publisher.
When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she 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, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. She 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. -- adapted from jacket