"I’ve Just Always Hated It When Anyone Suffers Alone":: Neoliberal Exhaustion and Regenerative Form in Anne Boyer’s The Undying

Abstract

This article discusses how experimental life-writing forms, particularly those ofautotheory, are directed towards new modes of expressing life with breast cancer. InAnne Boyer’s 2019 memoir The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness, the authortakes aim at the traditional narrative forms used to communicate breast cancer’sshock of diagnosis, pain of treatment, and epistemological uncertainty of prognosis.Such forms, Boyer argues, are not only exhausting, taxing to the individual living withthe challenges of breast cancer, but are also exhausted, leaving those wanting towrite about cancer in a narrative dead end. This article explores how such cancernarratives, which Boyer positions as part of a larger neoliberal project, can be resistedthrough the use of experimental form, that of autotheory. The Undying posits that thisneoliberal framing of breast cancer can only be resisted through a turn to collectiveexperience, and through multivocal forms. By exploring how autotheory creates akind of inexhaustible source of inspiration, challenging and sustaining alike, I arguethat Boyer’s memoir finds a form that resists the capitalist logic of cancer and itstreatments Show more