Positive4ColumnsThe Undying is like a \'make your own adventure\' book, but Boyer, now in remission, plays it out first, to help you in case you too face your mortality but get a second chance ... The Undying wants to be about everything, somewhat like Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie ... we learn that she taught full time during her treatment, but little of that experience makes it into the book’s insistent internal monologue. What does appear is astonishing ... The book knows not all exploitation and exposure are the same, but it also insists on the commons of suffering. People will have conflicting, maybe roiling, responses to its various claims that cancer is the world’s fault, that cancer is democratic ... I think any reader, but certainly I, would also feel lost in the middle of so many middles that compose Boyer’s book. I was muddled, but I coasted, then on multiple readings took in multiple cliffhangers, falls, rages, and arcs of stated and implied desire. That was more than okay. Spend time in the room with this ... All illness memoirs are conversion narratives in that sense, showing how some captive person became another kind of being. Maybe, in the solitary confinement of survival in the world that is also crowded, the story of her adaptation can be converted into a resource for yours.