The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer is a memoir sharing the author's experience with breast cancer within the larger context of how cancer is framed in American society. I read this book for The Stacks Book Club, and while I found this book to be interesting, it wasn't for me.
I think the goal of this book was a really great concept. The idea of how cancer, with a focus on breast cancer, is framed in American culture and how it's problematic was really interesting. The language similar to war and violence that we use to discuss cancer is fascinating, and I think that this was insightful. However, a lot of the philosophy that Boyer uses between her personal anecdotes is difficult to understand and conceptualize at times.
I thought that this approach to a memoir, with philosophical anecdotes and academia, and cancer as a topic in general was very different, but it was hard for me to stay engaged while I was reading it. This was a challenging book for me, but I think that the book club episode of The Stacks podcast helped me understand some of the parts that I couldn't make sense of originally.
Have you read The Undying? What did you think of it?
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