10 Best Personal History Pieces: #2 Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli, from Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (April 15, 2019)

This great piece is a deeply personal take on the ravages of cancer treatment. In 2014, Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent four rounds of intensive chemotherapy, followed by a double mastectomy. She describes the process as “semi-annihilation.” She describes her suffering in detail after excruciating detail:

Blood from chemotherapy-induced nosebleeds drips on the sheets, the paperwork, the CVS receipts, the library books. We emit foul odors. We throw up. We have poisonous vaginas and poisoned sperm. Because our urine is full of toxins, the signs in the bathroom instruct patients to flush twice.

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.

Every movie I watch now is a movie about an entire cast of people who seem not to have cancer, or, at least, this seems to me to be the plot. Any crowd not in the clinic is a crowd that feels curated by alienation, all the people everywhere looking robust and eyelashed and as if they have appetites for dinner and solid plans for retirement. I am marked by cancer, and I can’t quite remember what the markers are that mark us as who we are when we are not being marked by something else.

A nurse inserts a large needle into my subdermal port. First, things are drawn from me, then things are flushed in and out of me, then things drip into me. For each of these things that drip into me, I must say my name and when I was born. Of the many drugs that I am infused with, some have familiar, clear-cut effects: Benadryl, steroids, Ativan. I should know how these feel, but in this context they never feel like themselves. Instead, they combine with the chemotherapy drugs to create a new feeling, a unique mush of lack of clarity.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

Boyer puts us there – in the cancer pavilion, the infusion room, the recovery room. She says of the cancer pavilion:

The cancer pavilion is a cruel democracy of appearance: the same bald heads, the same devastated complexions, the same steroid-swollen faces, the same plastic ports visible as lumps under the skin. The old seem infantile, the young act senile, the middle-aged find that all that is middle-aged about them disappears. The boundaries of our bodies break. Everything we were supposed to keep inside us now seems to fall out.

Boyer doesn’t pretend to be heroic. She cries, rants, and rages her way through her treatment. In one of my favorite passages, she writes,

We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. We are supposed to be feisty, sexy, snarky women, or girls, or ladies, or whatever. Also, as the T-shirts for sale on Amazon suggest, we are always supposed to be able to tell cancer that “you messed with the wrong bitch!” In my case, however, cancer messed with the right bitch.

But she does have a desire to live. As bitter and negative as she sometimes is, she’s still on the side of life. She says it expressly (“During treatment, you must have a desire to live”) and she says it implicitly in her vivid, spirited, perceptual style. This, for example:

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.

And this:

My cancer was not just a set of sensations or lessons in interpretation or a problem for art, although it was all of these things. My cancer was a captive fear that I would die and leave my daughter in a hard world with no resources, a fear, too, that I had devoted my life to writing and sacrificed all I had and never come to its reward. It was a terror that all I’d ever written would sit data-mined but not read in Google’s servers until even Google’s servers were made of dust, and in the meantime I would become that unspeaking thing, a dead person, leaving too soon everyone and everything I loved the most.

In the end, Boyer’s body bore the unbearable. She survived the treatment. Her cancer was eradicated. She’s written an unforgettable account of her ordeal.