In “The Undying,” Anne Boyer firmly resists the narrative of the breast cancer patient given by popular culture. The narrative of breast cancer patients in popular culture- the myth that “attitude is everything,” the clichés of people with breast cancer who are consumed as both a source of courage and pity, the phrase that equates dying from cancer to “losing the battle against cancer”- unfairly burdens the patients with having to fit into the narrative. Critiquing literature that treats women’s illness as a sentimentalized tool for another character’s emotional turmoil, Boyer refuses to follow the common narrative form of cancer that ends with the protagonist’s survival or death. Boyer does not end the memoir with the end of her chemotherapy- instead, she excavates the reality of breast cancer by pointing out how the disease affects certain groups of people disproportionately, how the medical industry’s treatment of patients could be inadequate or even harmful, and how breast cancer is capitalized on. Her critique on how “Pinktober” profits from donations while doing little to improve the carcinogenosphere or develop a cure for breast cancer was startling, as it exposed the fact buying something with a pink ribbon on it might make you feel good about yourself, but actually worsens the problem. Boyer writes, “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as is.” (116) By challenging the popular narrative about breast cancer, Boyer’s memoir urges readers to alter their perception of cancer as an unfortunate event that strikes an individual that either survives or doesn’t, and perceive the structures that cause more pain for the patients.

I’ve attached the assignment as a .pdf file in order to preserve some formatting.

Wren, Writing Week 8

Process Notes: This was a fun, but challenging assignment for me. I had some difficulty in terms of tying it to my topic, but I found that talking about my PCOS and the symptoms that accompany applied to my exploration of expectations of Southern women because things like being overweight and sitting in a gynecologist’s office in a paper robe are directly against those expectations (modesty and beauty, respectively). I wanted to experiment with this two-thread structure, with one thread consisting of things that I’ve been told by various doctors (not exact quotes, but they capture the spirit of what was said), and a narration of the time leading up to the actual examination. I had to cut things kind of short since this piece really could have gone on and on, but I wanted to stop at the examination part for privacy reasons (a little bit) and to avoid having some topics being labeled as “shock value” (although I trust that nobody here would do that). I also played around with highlighting key words from conversations with doctors because I wanted to highlight the ways in which weight is brought up in medical environments when the patient is overweight, even when their lifestyle may be healthy.

EXERCISE

“I need medication,” my friend says, stepping forward to the Pick-Up Counter. 

The pharmacist, a short Asian woman with hair tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail, blinks. “Okay. What kind?” 

I nod at my friend reassuringly, before realizing I’m two steps behind and she can’t see me. She steps closer and leans over the counter. “Plan B.” 

“Generic or brand name?” It’s two minutes past nine in the morning, and I can still hear the sleep in the pharmacist’s voice. “Generic is ten bucks cheaper.”

My friend turns to me, her eyes searching. 

—

At 2:48 AM in the early hours of that morning she texted me, frantic. She had never used or needed Plan B before — for as long as I’d known her, she’d always been cautious and smart and only reckless when she knew she could laugh about it the next day. Five minutes before the pharmacy opened I had met her at the corner of the plaza, between a bank and a liquor store. She didn’t say much, looking down at her feet, mostly. 

“It’s only been, like, five hours,” she whispered, just before we walked through the automatic doors. 

“You’ll be fine.” I squeezed her shoulder. “This is so common. That’s barely any time passed at all. You’re totally fine.”

—

When I meet her eyes I shrug. “Generic works just as well. I’m pretty sure.” 

She turns back to the pharmacist, nodding. 

I nudge her boot with mine. “Hey, he gave you fifty, right? Looks like you made a profit.”

She giggles, before pushing the paper dollar bill across the counter. 

The pharmacist gives a small smile, too. “Do you want me to put it in a brown paper bag?” 

Her words make me think of Mr. Dolphus Raymond from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” who drank pop out of a paper bag to trick the town into believing his behavior was the product of alcoholism. That was the first time I realized you could manufacture the semblance of shame — and that there were things more important than shame. I watch as my friend accepts the paper bag and wonder what to her, at that moment, is more important. I wonder if she knows, even. 

It’s not until we’re walking to my apartment — it’s closer to the pharmacy than hers, and she wants to take the medicine as soon as possible — that I realize the pharmacist said next to nothing about the intake instructions. She didn’t even ask for my friend’s ID to check if she was old enough to buy the medication (in Illinois you have to be 17 or older — any younger and you’ll need more than just a paper bag). Standing in my kitchen I toss the bag to the side and take a pair of scissors to the plastic covering, which seems unnecessarily difficult to open, almost pettily so. We read the instructions, with “in 72 hours” and “soon as possible” sticking out but not in a more important way. 

“Make sure to keep track of your next period, okay?” I ask, wondering if these are the things pharmacists are supposed to tell you, and feeling a strange sense of kinship at the absence of her instructions — perhaps she knew we would have pored over the directions anyways, even if she shouldn’t have. Perhaps anything more than the paper bag would have been excessive, even though it shouldn’t have. Perhaps she was groggy with sleep, and forgot. “If it’s more than a week late, tell me,” I continue. 

She nods, and we spend the next half hour watching a reality TV dating show until her bus comes.  

PROCESS NOTES

In this assignment I wanted to explore the concept of shame and what shame is worth in the context of female reproductive healthcare. The experience of buying an emergency contraceptive pill is often shrouded in secrecy and taboo, compounding upon the already existing stigma around birth control with the notion of irresponsibility and sexual intimacy. Especially in moments where one party is more responsible for the situation– in this exercise, the friend’s partner is depicted as the responsible party given the financial burden he takes on — the experience involving dynamics of shame and information deficits are unique to the friend, a woman. I wanted to play with the notion of kinship between women in this excerpt because the notion that the pharmacist already understood that any further instructions beyond the brown paper bag would be didactic is something I wanted to explore — what is said by the unsaid, essentially. Again, I’m struggling with discussing this subject without falling into the realm of heteronormativity, and would appreciate any suggestions about how to work on that issue in my pieces.

Trigger Warning: Mentions of sex, sexual activity 

I hate going to the doctor. Not just any specific doctor really– all of them: dentist, psychiatrist, general practitioner, you name it. There is just something so unnatural to me about some stranger taking an intimate look at my body, or at least parts of it, touching it with their cold, gloved hands and either saying everything looks good or telling me what I need to do to change it. To which I always respond with something along the lines of “okay, thanks” and walk out of the office only to return a year later. 

So, I guess I hated the doctor for reasons that everyone else hated the doctor. It wasn’t until I got older that I started to hate the doctor for more reasons than I used to. When I went for my yearly check-up right when I turned 17, my doctor asked my mom to leave the room. I knew what was coming. She gave me a warm but professional smile, “Are you sexually active?” Even though I anticipated this question for the days leading up to the appointment, I still had no idea what to say. Since I went to Catholic school for my entire life, I had practically no sex education other than “remaining abstienent is the best way to not end up pregnant or with an STD.” So, forget any useful sex education that pertains to horny teenagers, let alone queer sex education. 

Flustered and suddenly anxious and red in the face, I had to tell her that the only experience I had was with someone of the same sex and that I was not sure if that qualified as sexually active. She simply nodded and asked, “So you’re practicing safe sex?” I promptly responded yes. How can I have unsafe sex if I’ve never been with a man? 

It wasn’t until my first year of college that I learned that STDs can be transmitted through same sex acts, specifically between sexual partners of the female sex. This was an eye-opening thing for me to learn. Why hadn’t anyone told me this before? It also wasn’t until a few months after that that my friend told me what dental dams were and how they were a good way to prevent against the spread of STDs when performing oral sex. 

If the health care system wants to prevent the spread of STDs among those who are sexually active, why don’t they alert those having sex of the ways they can practice it safely? Growing up, I was very aware of contraceptives used between sexual partners of the same sex, but where was this rhetoric for the queer community? This has been quite frightening to think about, as another public health crisis specifically centering around the queer community could very well happen again. 

Process Notes: When I first started writing this piece, I wasn’t really sure exactly what I could say, as I hadn’t associated my topic with anything STEM oriented before. As I kept writing, though, I realized that I do have experience with my queer identity in relation to sex education and the health care system. Even though this experience is my own, it is clearly shared by many queer individuals (AIDS crisis, as evidence). Writing this has made me realize that the lack of proper sex education in Catholic schools is another issue that pertains to my topic.

Anne Boyer points out how the healthcare system succeeds in both failing and over-medicalizing breast cancer patients — or even those without breast cancer who are misled to believe erroneous diagnoses. When it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of African American women with triple negative breast cancer, for example, Boyer notes that individuals within that demographic are less likely to be diagnosed but more likely to die from the illness. Boyer also contributes her unique perspective as a single mother, noting that “it should be no surprise that single women with breast cancer, even adjusting for age, race, and income, die of it at up to twice the rate of the married. The death rate gets higher if you are single and poor.” The system in particular lets down populations that are already underserved. 

The injustice of this institutionalized neglect is exacerbated by the expectations placed by popular culture on survivors and those presently affected by the illness. Cancer survivors are expected to tout an almost iconic appearance, and literature on survivors is most prized when it is not written by the survivor themself, but rather about an Other — “always about the sister, wife, or mother-in-law, all of the dying women with a bald head and none of them with a voice.” Literature written by the person experiencing the pain itself is less palatable than when sourced from observers experiencing the illness second-hand. And, as Boyer sharply notes, “women’s suffering is generalized into literary opportunity,” an act of exploitation rendered inaccessible to those actually experiencing the suffering. The form of a memoir brings this exclusion of the affected individuals out into the open, for within a memoir form there exists no narrative of the illness without the author themself — “I” and “cancer” become inextricable, and as such, the injustice done to patients robbed of their voice and mistreated by the system enter the spotlight. Only when such a usable platform is made available for those already exhausted by the war with the illness itself can social change come about. Part of the reparations for the wrongs inflicted upon women by the healthcare system, as well as the sensationalization of the archetypal illness by the mainstream, starts with allowing those affected by breast cancer to have a voice to expound upon the experience in totality — not only the aspects that can be marketed and capitalized upon in advantageous ways. Restoring this agency necessitates providing affected individuals with the option to choose and deliberate upon “what is written about it, or not written about it, or whether or not to write about it, or how,” essentially carving out a space to  answer the “disordering question of form.”

I need to provide two disclaimers about my response to this reading. The first is that I am incredibly squeamish so there were many visceral moments in this book that overwhelmed me. I also have had three surgeries – minor ones, especially compared to what Boyer endured – but her poignant descriptions of what a throbbing IV feels when its puncturing various parts of your body was more than enough to bring me back to my own recovery room experiences.

The second is that my mom is a radiologist who specializes in treating women with breast cancer. As such, I think I was very in-tune to the role that doctors play in this work. I found her section on p.55 about the callous studying that doctors do of the patient’s body to be thought-provoking. I know that my mom went into her field to heal people but I also know she did it because the work is fascinating to her – I had always considered that a win-win situation but this scene made me consider that to a patient, it must be demoralizing to understand that your dying body is also an exciting puzzle. There were also moments on p. 191 and p. 269 that unnerved me. These were moments in which Boyer addressed the skepticism that people have about breast cancer, some even going so far as to accuse doctors of lying to them about their diagnoses. Here, I heard my mom’s voice in my head. I know that Western medicine and all the doctors trained in it are not perfect and there have been some – very rare – cases of abuse. However, it horrified me that people would sow seeds of distrust between sick people and their doctors, preying on the dying’s desperate hope that their situation is a ruse ­– and, honestly, it horrifies me a little that Boyer would entertain the thought in her work, though I appreciate that it is an act of earnestness.

Another moment that I briefly want to note is on p. 256. Boyer describes the lengths that a tired woman goes to in order to not look tired, because the hallmark of a tired woman is that she always tries. I found that there was a lot to relate to in this passage, and I especially appreciated the details about this female “trying,” the lengths we go to make it look like we haven’t gone to any lengths.

I have a deathly fear of sharks. I struggle in the ocean, in dark lakes, even in deep swimming pools in which the painted bottom shimmers below like a ghostly mirage, like the pool might really descend deep down into the crust of the earth. Floating above, I stare at my pale feet dangling, like an ambrosial afternoon snack. My family and friends know that when I am in water, I need to be distracted at all times, that they shouldn’t even let me blink too long, or I will see the gaping jaws and jagged teeth rushing at me, bubbling like a torpedo. I have a deathly fear of sharks, which is strange, because it is far more likely that melanoma will kill me.

I go to the dermatologist four times a year for a full-body skin screen. That’s once a year for every family member that has had skin cancer: once for my mother, once for my father, for my maternal grandmother, and for my paternal grandmother. They are all, as you may suspect, ungodly pale. And they have all survived; their cancer battle was no more than a short, out-patient procedure and the sacrifice of a freckle or two. My mother even had melanoma while she was pregnant with me, a secret growing in the shadow of her nose while she was distracted by growing a human a few feet below. She had it removed shortly after I was born. The story ­– which is part of the legend of little me, a collection of tales that make my parents’ eyes grow misty – is that while she was changing my diaper, I kicked her in the face. The force of my tiny, fat foot dislodged the scab that had formed over the extraction site, removing the traces of the cancer and putting the whole ordeal to rest.

There are a lot of reasons why I am not afraid of melanoma. It hasn’t killed anyone I know. I feel like I could get rid of it if I kick hard enough. And, most compellingly, a mole just simply isn’t as sexy a villain as a shark. But there are far more reasons why I should be very afraid of melanoma, which my dermatologist reminds me of each year in quadruplicate.

The screening is much the same each time. I am handed a gorgeous, waffle-weave robe by a beautiful – but not intimidatingly so – blonde receptionist. I change into it and sit on the paper-wrapped chair, which crinkles in a way that makes me feel self-conscious, like other women’s thighs don’t make it crinkle so much. And then, I wait and enjoy the gelatinous feeling of my rib cage relaxing after it is released from my bra.

After fifteen minutes, there is a knock. My doctor pokes her immaculate head in. “Heeeey! You look great. You know, I have some students here. Do you mind if they watch?” I do not mind because my mom is also a doctor who teaches students, and when your mom is a doctor who teaches students, you are not supposed to mind that students all want to see your naked body because you know it is about the learning. I nod politely.

My doctor and her ducklings file in. I slip off my robe, quick and confident; I want them to know that I know that this is impersonal. I need them to know that this is impersonal because if this were personal, my stomach would cringe to the size of a golf ball, thus displacing all my other organs, and I would perish.

I roll onto my stomach and my doctors leans over me. Her exhales mark each place she searches for a small, strange, brown bomb embedded in my skin. “Oh, you guys!” This always happens. “Oh you guys, come look at this.”

I have learned to stop being afraid when she calls her baby dermatologists over. I have learned that’s not how she would tell me that I have some malignant, malicious cells growing on me like barnacles. I have learned that it happens because I am a fascinating study. My doctor has explained it x times and I have forgotten x + 1 times, so I cannot actually tell you why I am such a good specimen. It has something to do with the proximity and visibility of my blood vessels. Something to do with the fact that I have so little color, I rarely recover from any scar. Something to do with the time I got sunburned while having class in the shade on the quad for 50 min on a 70 degree day. Something to do with cancer.

The fledglings gather around. I hear them considering my physicality – they look at the minutia of my body, and I imagine the thoughts in their brains. I feel one light touch; I wonder which of them felt compelled to do that. And then they’re gone. “You’re good!” My dermatologists says as she shuts the door behind her.

I pull on my pants and re-cage my ribs. I move back into my body. I re-attach my skin to my soul. I walk out of the room and schedule another appointment.

Process Notes: I think this was a very cathartic and generative writing exercise. I didn’t even realize how much I had to say until I started writing. One subject that I didn’t really get a chance to bring into this piece –  but would like to – is the phenomenon that doctors, even women doctors, don’t take their female patients seriously. Studies show that women’s complaints are routinely ignored or assumed to be exaggerated. I think that has definitely conditioned me as a patient to act differently to all my doctors, including my dermatologist which, I think you can hear a little in the piece. I would love to bring that in more.

While reading Anne Boyer’s The Undying, I was struck by the way she simultaneously reinforces and subverts the writing techniques we’ve explored so far this quarter. Much of her discussion throughout the memoir surrounding the profitability or fetishization of patients’ “cancer stories” reminded me of Agee’s anxieties when writing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boyer writes, “At a poetry reading I attend during my illness, a poet is nearly shouting about a cancer she doesn’t have… None of this literature is bad, but all of it is unforgivable” (111). She continues, “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as is” (116). One of the proposed solutions to this issue was explained by Hartman and employed by Keene in Counternarratives. They both seem to be proponents of leaving gaps in narration which are necessary for an honest and non-presumptuous retelling of history and of social conditions which they may have not directly experienced. In other words, they highlighted the importance of “showing” rather than “telling,” underscoring the ethical responsibility to do so as an additional incentive beyond the fact that this form of writing is also more interesting to readers. 

Boyer, however, subverts this understanding of the potentially trite “Show, don’t tell.” She writes, “What being a writer does to a person is make her a servant of those sensory details, obedient to the world of appearances and issuing forth book after book compliant with deceptive and unforgivable showing… irresponsibly sparing every ethically required telling” (113). She says that “telling is that other truth, and the senses are prone to showing’s lies” (113). Boyer goes on to explain that “Showing is a betrayal of the real… showing and not telling is not reason enough to endure the disabling process required for staying alive” (113). Contrary to much of our discussion this quarter, Boyer believes that “telling” is a requirement when writing in an ethically responsible way. It is not enough to rely on the senses to illustrate her story, and as the one enduring this painful experience, she has the right to tell readers what she deems important. There isn’t a way that anyone other than Boyer herself can simply process what is being “shown” and then understand the truth behind the experience; this would be to neglect what Boyer calls the “other truth.”

I wonder if the approaches of Hartman/Keene and Boyer are really at odds with each other or if the tactics are simply particular to the types of narratives they are in reference to. Hartman and Keene both wrote with the intention of telling stories that deal with historical oppression and the voices of people who were silenced by that historical environment and are no longer here to share their experiences. Boyer, however, is writing about her own life. When dealing with memoir, perhaps the writer can never incorrectly or irresponsibly “tell” their own story.