WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2020 WINNER OF THE WINDHAM-CAMPBELL PRIZE FOR
NONFICTION 2020 FINALIST FOR THE PEN JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD 2020 'Profound and unforgettable'
Sally Rooney 'A classic . . . I have long thought of Boyer as a genius' Patricia Lockwood 'An
outraged beautiful and brilliant work of embodied critique' Ben Lerner 'Some of the most
perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read' Hari Kunzru
Blending memoir with critique an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of
sickness and health cancer and the cancer industry in the modern world A week after her 41st
birthday Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a
single mother living payslip to payslip the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into
new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. In The Undying - at once her
harrowing memoir of survival and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources
from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She
investigates the quackeries casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism and
dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths among them
Audre Lorde Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag. Genre-bending devastating and profoundly humane
The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer the cancer industry and the
sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.
