True Reads Book Club: The Undying

Come discuss the most interesting books in new Non-Fiction with our True Reads book club! Happening every 4-6 weeks hosted by Librairie Drawn & Quarterly staff.

For our February meeting, we’ll be reading THE UNDYING by Anne Boyer. The book club will meet at La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, 176 Bernard Ouest at 7pm. This month’s meeting is hosted by Drawn & Quarterly Bookseller Benjamin. Join us for discussion and drinks!

**We offer a 20% discount on THE UNDYING by Anne Boyer from now until the meeting date.*

THE UNDYING
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.

*By purchasing your book at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly you help support free events like this one, independent publishing and retailing, our neighborhood, and authors both local and from around the world who depend on independent bookstores for their livelihood. You also get to take advantage of a great discount! Your support is appreciated.