The Undying

What does it mean to turn pain—something often thought of as isolating and mute—into a language powerful enough to speak back to the world? In The Undying, poet and essayist Anne Boyer explores this question through her own experience with aggressive, triple-negative breast cancer. The book asks how we come to understand illness not just as a private catastrophe but as a public indictment of the systems that profit from suffering. Boyer’s argument runs sharply against the grain of modern cancer narratives: where most see survival as proof of heroic self-management, she sees it as evidence of a social structure that demands suffering be made marketable.

Drawing from history, philosophy, literature, and her own body’s testimony, Boyer argues that pain doesn’t destroy language—it transforms it. She contends that the ways we narrate illness reveal our deepest politics: who gets cared for, who is abandoned, and who pays for the privilege to live. Her core claim is fierce and intimate—to be sick in this world is to become a mirror of its cruelties. Yet, she insists, this mirror can be turned back upon the world to show the truth of its arrangements.

Pain as a Radical Form of Knowledge

Boyer’s central concept of an "education in pain" reframes suffering as a form of political and poetic insight. Through chemotherapy, surgeries, and long months of recovery, she becomes the student of how pain not only disassembles the body but exposes the hidden machinery of power. Pain shows its paradoxical democracy: everyone can feel it, but unequal systems make some people endure it far more. She describes how hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and neoliberal labor structures convert the sick into data points and consumers—how confinement to the bed turns into both solitude and surveillance.

Boyer draws on thinkers like Elaine Scarry and Hannah Arendt, who viewed pain as inexpressible. Against them, she writes that pain is not ineffable but forcibly silenced. Watching others flinch, hearing the cries of animals, feeling the phantom reactions of her amputated nerves—these become proof that pain speaks across bodies and species. Her writing insists that human empathy often fails not because pain is incomprehensible, but because society trains us not to listen.

Illness and the Market of Survival

One of Boyer’s major provocations concerns the myth of survivorship. She dismantles the pink-ribbon industries that have turned cancer into a spectacle of empowerment and consumption. The “awareness” economy, she notes, sells cure-themed cosmetics and fracking drills painted pink while ignoring racial and economic inequalities that determine who dies. The problem isn’t just who survives—it’s that the culture celebrates survival as a moral achievement rather than diagnosing the conditions that kill. Boyer’s portraits of online cancer communities, abandoned patients, and fraudulent medical studies reveal that health itself has become a neoliberal luxury.

Beauty, Violence, and the Broken Dictionary of Pain

Throughout the book, Boyer’s writing oscillates between lyric and critique—between wanting to make beauty of her suffering and hating that beauty for its false consolation. She transforms her experience into language that refuses pity and instead demands comprehension. She treats illness as a form of artistic resistance: each sentence reclaims the power that the world tries to take from the sick. “To write pain,” she suggests, “is to repair history’s failed language.” Her reflections align with those of writers like Audre Lorde and Kathy Acker, whose cancer works treated the body as both battlefield and text.

Ultimately, The Undying is not only a memoir of illness but a manifesto for how we might inhabit fragility differently. Boyer asks you to imagine pain as communication, illness as communal rather than private, and writing itself as an act of solidarity with the forsaken. When she survives, she refuses the title “survivor,” choosing instead to call herself undying—someone who remains aware, awake, and insubordinate within systems designed to make her disappear.

When Boyer receives her diagnosis, she describes it as falling onto “the hardness of language.” That moment—the transformation from person into patient—marks the beginning of losing one’s sovereignty. The lump in her breast moves from the system of the self to the system of oncology, no longer hers but an object of institutional classification. She calls this a conversion from body to data, where meaning is replaced by measurement. The language of medicine turns what was once sensation into numbers and categories, and with that shift, the self begins to erode.

The Screen Life of Sickness

Boyer compares modern diagnosis to ancient divination. Just as priests once read dreams or tea leaves, doctors now read digital shadows—MRI scans, PET images, the “light” of malignancy rendered by technology. Her idea of “being sick in light” captures how perception is outsourced to machines. The sick person must learn to accept invisible evidence, believing what she cannot feel. In this illumination, Boyer sees a metaphor for twenty-first-century estrangement: we are more measured than seen, more scanned than understood.

History Repeats in the Clinic

Drawing connections from the Greek orator Aelius Aristides—who sought healing in the temple of Asclepius—Boyer shows that medicine has always required faith. Aristides slept among the incubants to receive divine prescriptions; modern patients sleep among data servers and pharmaceutical protocols. Both depend on power hierarchies. The hospital, like the temple, is a theater of belief. She uses this historical lens to emphasize that medicine’s gendered and economic inequalities continue to rule who may seek care and who must suffer alone.

This transformation echoes other authors’ critiques of medical alienation (compare to Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, which depersonalizes disease). Yet Boyer insists that the cruelest part of diagnosis is not fear but forced belief: faith in the professional rituals that rename your pain and remove your agency. You’re asked to surrender the body to an authority who speaks a dialect only fear can obey.

By describing diagnosis as dispossession, Boyer teaches that to survive illness requires reclaiming the right to interpret your own body. She writes not to be cured but to reauthorize perception—to unlearn what institutions have told her about who she is and what her pain means. And through this act, she shows that writing itself can become a form of patient resistance.

In the section “Birth of the Pavilion,” Boyer transforms the chemotherapy clinic into a metaphor for capitalist bureaucracy. It becomes a place where bodies circulate like data—patients processed through standardized forms, logged, scanned, and measured by an army of nurses and paraprofessionals. Yet these same women—the caretakers of the data—embody the paradox of modern compassion: they administer empathy through keyboards and injections. Boyer’s reflections expose how care and surveillance intertwine.

Women’s Work and the Technology of Care

Boyer describes the labor of nurses and assistants as both tender and technocratic. They type while comforting, scanning patient bracelets while smoothing frightened arms. Their gestures mix intimacy with record-keeping—a ritual of digital touch. For Boyer, this feminized labor is undervalued precisely because it holds the world together. “The word care,” she writes, “rarely calls to mind a keyboard.” She reveals how compassion has been technologized and professionalized, yet remains invisible as work.

Toxic Beauty and Industrial Poisons

The chemotherapy drugs themselves embody these contradictions of care and destruction. Boyer recounts her infusions of Adriamycin—the “ruby of the Adriatic”—a poison beautiful enough to melt linoleum and corrode human cells. The aesthetics of medicine, she suggests, disguise its violence. Her descriptions of red fluid flowing through veins become a gothic hymn to modernity’s elegance of ruin. These drugs, she reminds us, originate in chemical warfare: mustard gas turned therapeutic. In caring for the sick, society repurposes its own tools of annihilation.

Capitalism of the Cure

By tracing the financial circuits behind every vial, Boyer shows how medical systems resemble factory floors. Each drug carries environmental consequences—the chemicals lingering in water systems, the destroyed Himalayan yew trees harvested for Taxol. Her insight brings ecological collapse inside the hospital: disease and resource exploitation become two faces of the same economy. Cancer treatment isn’t separate from the world—it is one of its symptoms.

Boyer’s clinic is a miniature of the global system—efficient, profitable, cruelly intimate. The pavilion’s architecture of comfort masks a system that makes illness a form of labor and its cure a form of commerce. Through this, she asks you to see healthcare not as salvation, but as evidence of a world that administers care only as a profitable transaction.

Pain, Boyer writes, “incapacitates the dictionary.” This idea becomes one of the book’s major hinge points. Philosophers like Elaine Scarry have long claimed that pain destroys language; Boyer counters that it simply makes new kinds of language necessary. The real tragedy isn’t ineffability—it’s that society refuses to build the vocabulary pain requires. Through her illness, she develops a grammar of suffering that reconnects words to bodies and bodies to one another.

Pain as Expression, Not Silence

She points out the blatant communicability of pain: the cries, whimpers, body gestures that cross species boundaries. Every howl is testimony. Even the face of a cat in hurt is unmistakable. Pain speaks in exclamations—“Ow!” “That burns!”—words that philosophers often discard because they lack metaphysical subtlety. Boyer restores these utterances to dignity, showing them as primal articulations of being. The problem, she insists, is not language’s failure but philosophy’s disinterest in listening.

Shared Suffering and the Risk of Empathy

Witnessing pain provokes sympathy—but also violence. Boyer notes how adults threaten children with “something to cry about,” symbolizing how pain’s expressivity can incite rage. Sadists, she reminds you, depend on visible suffering for pleasure; if pain were silent, sadism would have no thrill. From this, she concludes that pain is both a form of communication and a site of social danger. To acknowledge another’s agony is to face your own discomfort—and too often, people turn that discomfort into cruelty or denial.

Language as a Tool for Solidarity

Against isolation, Boyer imagines a collective lexicon—a “Temple of Giulietta Masina’s Tears,” a monument for public weeping. This speculative space would turn sadness into communion, proving that grief can be infrastructural. Her dream of this temple, inspired by Masina’s cinematic tears in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, becomes an allegory for language itself: a place where suffering is shared and protected. Pain, here, becomes the architecture of empathy.

Her argument redefines the ethics of expression. When you speak pain, you participate in the remaking of society’s emotional infrastructure. The words may falter, but the attempt itself is revolutionary. Boyer’s illness teaches that language, however broken, can still rescue connection from isolation—and that suffering together is one way to build a truer community.

Cancer, Boyer observes, is haunted by an industry of optimism. The “Cancer Survivor” myth converts suffering into market-friendly heroism, encouraging cheerfulness even while poisoning the body. In “The Hoax,” she unpacks stories of falsified diagnoses and fraudulent cures—from lifestyle bloggers like Belle Gibson to pharmaceutical corruption—and asks why hope itself has become a commodity. Her critique dismantles the moral logic that makes illness a test of self-discipline and positivity.

The Empire of Pink

Boyer ridicules the annual carnival of Pinktober—the breast cancer awareness campaign that paints weapons, cars, and cosmetics in pink ribbons while ignoring systemic deprivation. She notes the hypocrisy of corporations like Susan G. Komen partnering with polluters and fast-food chains, “selling benzene for the cure.” The pink ribbon, once a sincere grassroots protest, has become a brand symbol for capital’s sentimental conscience. Her fury at this exploitation shows how survival has been recast as spectacle. (This echoes Eula Biss’s critique in “The Pain Scale,” which also treats illness as monetized empathy.)

The False Narratives of Cure

Boyer exposes medical scams—the false promise of bone marrow transplants in the 1990s, the doctor who fabricated data to sell hope. She shows how people with cancer become experimental subjects for profit and faith. Her examples of forged research and overpriced treatments reveal a system guided more by mythology than medicine. In these stories, cruelty hides behind compassion: the desire to cure is easily weaponized against the vulnerable.

Beyond Survival: Rethinking What “Living” Means

Rejecting slogans like “fuck cancer” or “you can beat this,” Boyer insists that illness isn’t a contest and cure isn’t victory. Her friend Coopdizzle, who dies of metastatic breast cancer, is portrayed not as losing but as testifying—the only honest role left in a lying world. Boyer’s own survival is therefore not triumph but aftermath. To live is to inhabit damage, to become ethically responsible for the dead who could not afford their cures.

She writes that the ideology of positivity is itself toxic—a demand that the sick conceal their horror so others can continue believing in comfort. The book’s anger replaces hope with lucidity: compassion means seeing clearly, not pretending things are fine. In rejecting “survivor” narratives, Boyer reclaims illness as a site of solidarity rather than self-help.

After treatment, Boyer writes about exhaustion with the same precision she once reserved for love. To be exhausted, she says, is to live in the ruins of capitalism: a body that has sold all its hours to survive. This exhaustion is not restlessness but depletion—a laborer’s condition universalized across society. In the chapter “Wasted Life,” she turns this physical and emotional emptiness into philosophy, locating beauty in failure and persistence in burnout.

Exhaustion as Democracy

“Exhaustion is democratic,” she writes, “lacking fans.” Everyone is tired, she observes, but not equally. Survivors of illness, workers, and caretakers share the same fatigue of sustaining life under exploitative conditions. Boyer’s reflections recall Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 critique of sleepless capitalism, but her focus remains intimate: the body’s incapacity becomes a moral revelation. Exhaustion shows who is living beyond their means of being alive.

Writing as Resistance

Even worn out, Boyer insists on writing. Her prose anchors survival in language; writing becomes what she calls a “minor form of reparative magic.” Each paragraph is an attempt to make meaning from depletion—a refusal to let tiredness erase thought. She turns what most would view as weakness into an art of endurance, proving that failure itself can be creative.

The Political Body

Exhaustion connects personal suffering to collective exhaustion—the overworked nurses, the unpaid caregivers, the precarity of freelance thinkers like Boyer herself. She reminds you that illness doesn’t isolate; it reveals how many lives are structured around the grind of survival. Her meditation ends by calling exhaustion “the saint of the wasted life”—not a failure to work, but evidence that the world demands too much of the living.

For readers, this is an invitation to rethink worth: you do not owe productivity to existence. The exhausted, Boyer tells us, are the prophets of a new compassion—those who show what it costs to stay alive in systems designed for depletion.

In the epilogue, Boyer declares: “I didn’t die, or at least not of this.” This statement defines the book’s title—The Undying—as a paradox of survival. She has lived but also crossed into posthumous awareness. To be undying is to remain among the living while knowing their vulnerability completely. This knowledge, she argues, is the ultimate gift of illness: not health restored but vision intensified. Survival becomes a new state of consciousness.

The Posthumous Self

Her daughter tells her that she’s done “the impossible”—writing from inside a living posthumousness. Boyer transforms survival into a literary condition, describing how illness scrapes away illusions until only essence remains. “Lost into my own intensified version,” she writes. This awareness makes life not cleaner but more honest. Mortality, she says, is “a gorgeous framework”: the moment when emotions and politics and matter align with truth.

Friends, Care, and the Communism of the Unlovable

In her recovery, friendship replaces ideology. Her survival is sustained by community—friends who empty surgical drains, send cannabis popcorn, bury hospital bills as art. These private acts of love form what she calls the “communism of the unlovable,” care beyond family or profit. Boyer uses these examples to imagine an alternative world built on collective tenderness. The people who cared for her become proof that despite capitalism’s greed, we carry the seeds of another economy: one of generosity.

Writing After Death

Every act of writing becomes resurrection. Boyer says she wanted her book to raise an insurgent army of dead women—to make literature a revenant force against oblivion. Although she admits she cannot “write well enough to do that,” her attempt itself is radical. Like Margaret Fuller’s final words, “I see nothing but death before me,” Boyer’s survival speaks as a continuation of their interrupted voices. Her undyingness is solidarity with those cut short.

In the end, Boyer does not celebrate health but invites you into the awareness health conceals—the recognition that living itself is fragile, costly, miraculous. The undying are not immortal; they are simply awake. Through her transformation, Boyer shows that to see clearly after suffering is the purest life available, and that art can make sorrow indestructible.