Undying by Anne Boyer *****

Undying by Anne Boyer is a poetic and literary exploration of breast cancer. It explores the experience from historical and personal points of view with imagery and feelings. It is powerful and poetic. In the middle, the book turns dark when it considers doctors, treatments, and hospitals, especially in the United States. “The pharmaceutical companies lie. The doctors lie. The sick lie. The healthy lie. The researchers lie. The Internet lies.” And that’s the good news.

The author characterizes the politics of U.S. breast cancer health care with: “While [mastectomy patients] don’t get a hospital bed to recover in or rehabilitation for the cognitive damage incurred during their treatment, what they do get in the United States is federally mandated access to breast reconstruction—any type of implant they want.” The standard of care is “drive-by mastectomies.”

In the chapter titled, The Hoax, the author skewers the Internet, over-diagnosis, and frauds. All of this might be familiar to many readers, but she also attacks chemotherapy. “Maybe [future] medical historians will view chemotherapy with the same perplexed curiosity that ours do formerly common medical practices such as bloodletting—that not only did we severely poison people in attempts to make them well, but that even in those instances when chemotherapy doesn’t and won’t work and results in death, damage, and disability, there remains a popular desire for breast cancer patients to undergo it.”

“Too many women I know say they wish they had chosen, instead of treatment by drugs with mutilating and disabling effects, to die of their cancer.”

Beautifully written.

2020 Pulitzer Prize. The art and science of breast cancer. Read it!

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