Pick of the Issue this week is Anne Boyer’s extraordinary “The Undying,” a personal essay on “what cancer takes away.” One of the things it takes away, Boyer says, is identity:
Once my hair is gone, once I can no longer taste my food, once I have passed out while shopping for a bread knife in IKEA,once the ex-lovers have all visited to make one last attempt to get me in bed, once the generous humiliations of crowdsourced charity have assured me months of organic produce, I have become a patient. The old ways are through. Any horizon is made of medicine. Any markers of specific identity beyond “the sick” and “the healthy” come from another era.
That “The old ways are through. Any horizon is made of medicine” is inspired! Boyer writes like an angel – an angry, perceptive, expressive angel. Her claim that cancer has reduced her identity to "patient" is belied by the verve of her writing. When she says, “But I was always starving for experience, not its cessation,” I believe her. She takes the mass experience of chemotherapy and individualizes it:
I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.
By interposing her perception and expression, Boyer transfigures her condition and effects thereby the redress of art.
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