Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
    The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
    The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

    Written by Anne Boyer

    Narrated by Amy Finegan

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Award-winning poet and essayist Anne Boyer delivers a one-of-a-kind meditation on illness in the age of data?sharing her true story of coping with cancer, both the illness and the industry, in The Undying. 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.

    Editor's Note

    Pulitzer Prize winner…

    “The Undying” was on of two winners for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It’s “an elegant and unforgettable narrative about the brutality of illness and the capitalism of cancer care in America,” wrote the prize’s judges.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 17, 2019
    ISBN9781980043119
    The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
    Author

    Anne Boyer

    Anne Boyer is a poet and essayist. She was the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and winner of the 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry. Her books include A Handbook of Disappointed Fate as well as several books of poetry, including the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award–winning Garments Against Women. She was born and raised in Kansas, and was educated in its public schools and libraries. Since 2011, Boyer has been a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

    Related to The Undying

    Related audiobooks

    Medical Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Undying

    4.5/5

    43 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      A gut wrenching, thought provoking book that studies pain, mortality, medical treatments and illness in general centering on the author's own life and her battle against breast cancer.. Although she obviously survives this is not a feel good book. Being a poet and a teacher she does a tremendous amount of historical research on breast cancer and death going all the way back to the Greeks. She emphasized John Donne's poetry in particular. She is laser focused in her indictment of our current health care system and its inadequacy for patients like she was. A very important book.
    • 5/5
      This is a brilliant, brave, and harrowing book.