After reading Undying for the third time this quarter (in truth, I’ve continually reread it), I was struck this time by the ways in which the tales of cancer patients are so often told not by themselves, but by the peripherals. The stories are told by partners, friends, family members, all of whom are affected by the patient’s cancer, but not by the actually sufferer. Like Allison, I found a quote from page 111 to be of great interest regarding this phenomenon. It’s this idea that one person’s suffering seems to spur other people’s “epiphanies” that I found quite thought-provoking. When people with cancer are seen, so often through the eyes of those who are close to them, it is their appearance that is noticed, not their raw, true feelings. I think that that was why I was–and am–so entranced with this text. Boyer has undertaken this very deep, intense project of interweaving all of these different threads of personal experience, collective experience, and also this address of expectation.

On page 256, the author addresses they ways in which she finds herself altering her appearance to obscure, or perhaps simply defamiliarize, exhaustion. This push to hide or to pretend, to perform health, is particularly noteworthy for me for a couple of reasons. For one, feeling as if one must hide their own, personal struggles in order to preserve the comfort of others is an intensely familiar experience. It also ties back to my topic, this idea that women try to so hard to appear as if it’s all effortless or as if it’s a duck-on-the-water situation, even when it’s just not. Boyer’s acts here, the ways in which she keeps up the never-ending facade of womanhood in the face of the grim reality of cancer should be addressed.