I don’t know why this book wasn’t for me. It almost seems unjust to rate it as it is such a raw and beautifully delivered experience. Anne Boyer manages to share her cancer diagnosis and subsequent fall from grace (good health) in a way that doesn’t quite feel like a passage from a pathological state to a healthy one. Her kind of breast cancer is the most agressive and untreatable one, which leaves her at the mercy of a particular kind of calousness of the capitalist American system, and both to an illness and a cure that never really go away even if the cancer clears and she survives. She explores the grey area of an almost-death and a cruel cure where, almost unbelievably, there is a prescribed norm for pain, length of disease and treatment, etc. 
This undiluted account is painful and gut-wrenching to read. There are many passages to love and highlight and re-read.
I guess I was perhaps expecting another form of writing. There are a lot of x is y, rather than a descriptive or immersive kind of account. It feels like a balance, delivered in aphorisms at times, rather than a book written with the reader in mind. The author says so herself: this is a book for the sick. She also implies that we have either been there or will be there but her kind of suffering is specific to a kind of cancer (and gendered cancer on top of it). So, it also means that this is a slice of reality that exposes the failings of capitalism and a society that can only understand clear-cut situations. So no, it is not only for the sick. However, this being a painful lived experience the rage is palpable but it does not always makes - for me - a great read. I do recommend it though because it is highly perceptive and an important topic. I suspect that this was not the right moment for me to read it I guess.

This book is kind of terrible (I’m sorry!) An endorsement quote on the cover describes it as “profound and unforgettable” but I have to disagree with that assessment. I didn’t find The Undying nearly as groundbreaking or eye-opening as other readers seem to.

I know this is going to sound mean, but it feels like Boyer was simultaneously trying too hard and not hard enough, with more of a focus on appearing erudite than on actually demonstrating that intelligence. Her writing style sometimes resembles that of a teenager – an intellectual aesthetic which lacks real substance, angsty attempts at poetry, reels of anecdotes that don’t flow together at all, and countless tangents that probably make sense to her but seem completely irrelevant to the reader. It’s a mess.

Boyer also has a tendency to come across as incredibly unempathetic – not to mention hypocritical – making the book downright unpleasant to read at times. She repeatedly brings up horrors she doesn’t face (eg: racism, drone strikes, AIDS) just to make a point, and yet she acts like it’s appropriation when people express grief for loved ones with cancer when they themselves don’t have it. There are a few passages where she casually talks about doing some pretty awful things, such as guilt tripping an obviously distressed and uncomfortable friend into looking at her body.

I don’t know... I really don’t like this book, and I don’t understand how my opinion of it differs so drastically from mainstream views. Did we read the same book?