‘I’ve Just Always Hated It When Anyone Suffers Alone’: Neoliberal Exhaustion and Regenerative Form in Anne Boyer’s The Undying

This article discusses how experimental life-writing forms, particularly those of autotheory, are directed towards new modes of expressing life with breast cancer. In Anne Boyer's 2019 memoir The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness, the author takes aim at the traditional narrative forms used to communicate breast cancer's shock of diagnosis, pain of treatment, and epistemological uncertainty of prognosis. Such forms, Boyer argues, are not only exhausting, taxing to the individual living with the challenges of breast cancer, but are also exhausted, leaving those wanting to write about cancer in a narrative dead end. This article explores how such cancer narratives, which Boyer positions as part of a larger neoliberal project, can be resisted through the use of experimental form, that of autotheory. The Undying posits that this neoliberal framing of breast cancer can only be resisted through a turn to collective experience, and through multivocal forms. By exploring how autotheory creates a kind of inexhaustible source of inspiration, challenging and sustaining alike, I argue that Boyer's memoir finds a form that resists the capitalist logic of cancer and its treatments.