On Chemo: Anne Boyer and Colm Tóibín

Bianca Bagnarelli's illustration for Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

I’ve just finished reading Colm Tóibín’s superb “ ‘It’s curable,’ he said” (London Review of Books, April 18, 2019), an account of his experience of chemotherapy. It’s the second “chemo” piece I’ve read recently. The other is Anne Boyer’s “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019). It’s interesting to compare them.  

Boyer’s piece is linguistically richer. For example, here’s her opening paragraph:

Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined architecture of sadness: gargoyles made of night sweat, moldings made of longest minutes, support beams made of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on.

You’ll not find arresting, original phrases like “gargoyles made of night sweat” in Tóibín’s piece. His is less a meditation and more a plain blow-by-blow description of what happened to him. It reads more like a journal. Here, for example, is his description of how he felt during and after his third chemotherapy session:

Slowly, as the chemo went on, things got worse. There were a few hours, especially in the early evening, that were almost OK, but the rest of the time was grim. There was no pain again, just increasing weakness, continued lack of appetite and growing depression. Nonetheless, the hospital was almost fine, filled with distractions and things that amused me. I liked everybody there and that helped. It was the time at home that was hard. One morning, a few days after I had finished the third week of chemo, I knew that I couldn’t go on. I found it difficult to stand and could no longer leave the house. I hadn’t eaten anything for three days. I was determined, however, to follow the agreed schedule, which included a blood test the following day. If there were any real problem the blood test would show what it was. But I found myself sitting in the middle of a room in real distress. It wasn’t just the lack of energy, or the inability to think, or the sense of some vast shadow wandering in my head: it was much more active and present than that. I tried my five-minute trick. I imagined that this would last only for five minutes. All I had to do was concentrate on the next five minutes, keeping at bay the certain knowledge that there would be many such five minutes and that would include today, all day.

Chemo devastated Tóibín. It wasn’t much kinder to Boyer. While she’s recovering from one of her treatments, she counts up her wounds:

The pains in my body were not precise instructions for the future or reliable accounts of the past. The entire upper half hurt: neck arms glands abdomen back eyeballs throat face shoulder head. There was one spot, on the side of what would be my new left breast, that hurt like an emergency. There was another spot, on the side of what would be my new right breast, that hurt like a minor emergency.

But as bad as it gets for Tóibín (at one point, after finishing his fourth and final treatment, he describes his condition as “like mixing a major hangover with a major flu”), he never mentions death. In contrast, Boyer’s piece is death-haunted. She writes,

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.

I’m not sure Tóibín ever viewed his cancer as “a problem for art.” Unlike Boyer, who says having cancer opened her to “wild deathly thinking,” Tóibín repeatedly talks about his “inability to think” (“Everything that normally kept the day going was reduced to almost zero. I couldn’t think”; “I had such great resistance to thought that I didn’t even worry”). Nevertheless, both writers are artists to the tips of their fingernails (due to the chemo, Boyer’s nails actually lift and fall off). Both have produced transfixing records of their encounter with “the red devil.”