RaveThe BelieverUnlike a memoirist, Boyer does not tell a story. Her work of critique privileges metaphor in conveying its message, and it aspires to literature, not testimony ... What happens when literature is not, following Aristotle, an imitation of \'men in action\'? What happens when, instead, it creates the experience of being one among many women who are subjected to extractive economic and legal systems designed by wealthy men? In a wry, oracular voice, she answers these questions by blending personal narrative, political discourse, historical investigation, and literary examination to reveal the political and economic structures that multiply suffering for patients. She seeks to separate art from artifice, and to demystify who holds power in our world ... These moments of intimacy are often humorous, a way to insist that this book was not written to elicit a readers’ pity, or compassion for Boyer as an individual patient, but to draw our attention outward, to the political and social structures that shape sickness. In many illness memoirs, we stay close to the first-person narrator throughout the story, becoming consumed by our own empathic responses to their struggles. Boyer resists this reading; her own experience is a touchstone rather than propeller. She is critical, and her critiques glint with truth. Yet, as someone whose mother died of breast cancer, I found that her quick forays into personal detail drew me closer to Boyer’s literary persona. I couldn’t help but care. That said, some of Boyer’s most memorable writing emerges in her critique of the \'pinkwashed\' landscape of breast cancer survivorship ... The book’s force...comes from its complex form. Each chapter reads like a series of prose poems, and relies heavily on metaphor to explore its questions ... The fragmented chapters can be disorienting: at times, in paragraphs dense with metaphor, critique, dream, and anecdote, I found it difficult to remember where I was in Boyer’s narrative timeline. This stylistic choice risks alienating readers who aren’t familiar with how to approach an \'experimental\' text ... Boyer does her best to offer signposts as to how to navigate the book throughout. If you stay with her, the effect of her prose is astonishing.
