Undying cover

Undying

by Anne Boyer

"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." -- When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. She will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally perversely glorious. -- adapted from jacket

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Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?