PositiveThe New RepublicOne of the most astonishing aspects of this story is the way it shows the practice of psychotherapy blurring into a form of social control ... Stille’s book and the story of the Sullivanians raise questions about just what we are seeking when we go to a therapist for help.
Anne Boyer
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksAnne Boyer’s The Undying is a book about illness that doesn’t fit easily into...categories. A reader enters it expecting a memoir about Boyer’s journey through a diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer but quickly learns that the book (despite the publisher’s classification on the back cover) does not intend to meet such an expectation ... it is really a manifesto, declaring that the telling of a single story is in fact a lie, an act that elides the full sinister horror of the system of cancer ... Although Boyer resists the memoir genre, and rages at it, she inevitably writes inside of it. This wrestling against her own—or any singular—experience, which gives her book its power, occasionally cripples her; she dodges and weaves out of the way of her story so much that she sometimes risks losing her reader’s attention. She is aware of this, however, and lets her resistance show, so that the reader in turn finds herself questioning how her own need for a coherent story implicates her in the systems she is reading about ... Boyer is angry, and she makes it clear that all of us should be. The Undying is slippery and elusive in its very form, and you come away feeling that the book itself encapsulates the frustration with the inadequacies of our existing modes for tackling anything of this size.
