I was surprised by, despite using scientific vocabulary, Boyer borrowed substantially and developed from literary and philosophical writings. Instead of telling a linear narrative, the book is almost pieced together with connected treatises interrogating cancer and her experience in fragments: specimens of the object of cancer each subjected to the dissection of an instrument she develops. It is almost as if she is establishing another form of science rooted in rigors of thought. On many occasions, her book reads like ethnography, less like a memoir. Unlike Agee, riddled with ethical and moral entanglements of studying another, Boyer’s study of herself as a “we”. As Sontag wrote, this we is between the too concrete and too abstract, but gives one really the liberty and agency to think.

Regardless of the cold tone, she nonetheless delivers turbulence of emotion with her writing. On page 29, she writes of her friend who drove to help get her diagnosis at lunch. At the end, Boyer matter-of-factly notes:”She then went back to work.” This sentence did a lot for me. It allows the reader to soak in the complex emotions without trying to capture a part by making sentimentalizing, imperfect descriptions. The silence and space it leaves also mirrors the actual situation; like she quoted from Audre Laurde in the Prologue, this was the space of silence around it. And she is not filling it up with pink noise.