By Anne Boyer
The Undying is a cancer narrative in the form of creative nonfiction. The text has a dreamy quality, with vignettes from Boyer’s personal experiences interwoven with pieces of historical and biomedical information for context.
Boyer deals heavily with paradoxical wellness, though from a slightly different angle. While most works on this site describe the pre-diagnosis states of either being anticipated patients or being ill without knowing it, Boyer deals with the dissonance of having been diagnosed, and knowing one is gravely ill, but still feeling alright.
She also deals with the tensions of prognosis, both in the instrumentalization of others’ lived experiences with cancer in order to generate statistical reports as well as her own difficulty in translating her symptoms into something easily digested by the medical system. Boyer also addresses the disconnect she feels between her prognosis and the direction her illness is taking, metaphorically linking it to the prophecies of ancient oracles rather than a scientifically backed prediction.
She also addresses the paradox of chemotherapy– though it is a cure for cancer, its side effects are grievous and sometimes deadly:
