2nd Book Club Meeting @ Southern Brewing: The Undying by Anne Boyer

Join us on December 3rd at 7pm at Southern Brewing & Winery for our second meeting! We'll be discussing The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, a mixture of essay and memoir, by the poet Anne Boyer. Description below:

"A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying 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, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.

A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying 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."

You can purchase a copy at Bookshop.org. A free e-book is also available through the Hillsborough County Public Library. If you have any trouble getting a copy, let us know! And reading the entire book is encouraged but not mandatory. ;)

Grab a drink (or a soda) and come hang out with us. We'll be meeting on the outside patio this time!