The Memoir Spot
A snapshot review of a book related to the Non-fiction Feature
Also in Bulletin #47:
The Non-fiction Feature: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Product Spot: Cancer screening tests
The Pithy Take
Poet Anne Boyer’s memoir about her cancer–from the diagnosis to chemo to everything after–screams with rage. It isn’t just a retelling of her survival, but it’s also an exploration of illness, breast cancer specifically. It’s not a cheerily-guised rendering of cancer walks, marathons, and pink ribbons; rather, she makes piercing observations of the pain of cancer, the pain of chemotherapy, the pain of loneliness, and the pain of knowing that much of this pain was wrought by capitalism, not nature.
Beyond that, her prose is magnificent–deliberately paced, swiveling between rushes of emotion and beautifully wrought descriptions of the havoc that cancer has wreaked on her body.
Someone once said that choosing chemotherapy is like choosing to jump off a building when someone is holding a gun to your head.
You jump out of fear of death, or at least a fear of the painful and ugly version of death that is cancer, or you jump from a desire to live, even if that life will be for the rest of its duration a painful one.
The Undying: pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care
Author: Anne Boyer
Publisher: Picador
320 pages | 2020
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