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.
