Given to me as a thank-you gift by Kelsie Snow for appearing on her podcast, Sorry, I’m Sad (I should have been giving her gifts really for the opporunity to talk) I read this book slowly over the last couple weeks. I’m not even sure how to describe this book. The Undying by Anne Boyer is not your typical “I’ve got cancer and now I don’t” book. Boyer had cancer but once treatment was done and she was considered “cured” she never felt the same. As she mentions in the book, usually when you are reading about cancer (usually in fiction) is that it is always “someone else” who has cancer in the story thus leading to epiphanies for the characters. As narrator, Boyer is the main character. The only epiphanies being had our her own.
The part that got to me the most was the beginning when Boyer goes through the list of women writers who got breast cancer - often in their 40s: Susan Sontang (41), Rachel Carson (53), Jacqueline Susann (44), Charlotte Perkinds Gilman (no age given but she killed herself because of it), Audre Lorde (44), Kathy Acker (49) - and others. This small handful of women writers is proof that the myth of “you’re too young” is so wrong. Obviously women in their 40s have been dying from breast cancer for centuries. The only reason it is now being diagnosed in women younger than 40 is because of modern medicine and that’s when cancer probably develops (except that I know of a large handful of women in their 20s with Stage IV breast cancer as well). I was 39 when diagnosed but looking back I know I was living with cancer for years. So why the myth of “no mammograms until your 50 (- or is it 60?)
Boyer is a poet who was writing parts of this book while going through treatment. Lots of parts of jumbled and poetic. Sometimes that is hard to understand. She talks about lonliness, the friends who leave, the friends who stay (she is a single mother with a 14 year old daughter). She talks about having to be driven from her mastectomy to her job because she had a class to teach. She could barely hold herself up from the amount of pain she is in but she also can’t afford to lose her job. I can’t even imagine. Almost three years later and I am still in pain from my mastectomy. Not just physically but intrinsically, spiritually, I mourn the loss of my breast on almost every level.
I want to pull quotes from this book but there is so much here in such a small volume that I can’t choose what to say. Nothing I say/write is going to explain this book. Boyer moves back and forth through literature to talk about breast cancer/cancer/illness in history. How she describes the hospital and the “red devil” chemo she was given (which I have, thankfully, never experienced) that while it may kill the cancer it also kills so much more. Boyer’s book is a brutal and honest account of living through chemo and radiation it’s effects.
Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.
I’m not sure I agree with that statement though. We live the way we do because we think we are invincible and diseases and disabilities are something that happen to other people. You only have to think about it once it happens to you - or perhaps to someone you love with whom you are really close to. But we aren’t programed to be thinking about our death all the time until that time that it is staring us in the face. This is why children and teenagers think they can do anything - because they need that mentality in order to try. This is why 20 year olds are essentially selfish - because they are trying to figure out their place in the world and everyone elses place doesn’t register on their radar.
Even as someone who is facing death all the time I still try to live like I don’t have a shortened timeline. I know, I know, we all have a timeline - but being told you have cancer is something that one never gets over. Being told you have terminal cancer and that they can only try and minimize it’s effects for a while before it kills you is something you are going to hear on repeat in your head every day for the rest of your days.
People with breast cancer are supposed to be ourselves as we were before, but also better and stronger and at the same time heart-wrenchingly worse. We are supposed to keep our unhappiness to ourselves but donate out courage to everyone else. We are supposed to, as anyone can see in YouTube videos, dance toward our mastectomies, or, as in Sex and the City, stand up with Samantha in the ballroom and throw off our wigs while a banqueting crowd roars with approval…
We are supposed to be legible as patients and illegible as our actual selves while going to work and taking care of others as our actual selves now with the extra work of the false heroics of legibilty as a disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after, too, bald and radiant and funny and productively exposed. We are supposed to, as the titles of the guidebooks instruct, be fiesty, sexy, thinking, snarky women, girls, or ladies or whatever. Also as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer, “you messed with the wrong bitch.”
Cancer kills people, as does threatment, as does lack of treatment, and what anyone believes of feels has nothing to do with it. I could hold every right idea, exhibit every virture, do every good deed, and follow every institutiona command and still die of breast cancer, or I could believe and do every wrong thing and still live.
Dying of breast cancer is not evidence of the weakness or oral failure of the dead. The moral failure in breast cancer is not in the people who die: it is in the world that makes them sick, bankrupts them for a cure that also makes them sick, bankrupts them for a cure that also makes them sick, then, when the cure fails them, blames them for their own deaths.
Boyer doesn’t pull any punches in her book and though it is very in-your-face about what she is going through it is probably the most honest account of breast cancer literatue I have ever read.
My my... that book sounds heavy but important. I definitely want to give it a read.
I just put it on hold at the library...