If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered how centuries of literature and history have shaped—and often distorted—the way we perceive a woman’s struggle with illness?
- Did you know that the modern 'culture of survivorship' often masks a complex reality of class politics and corporate profit?
- Are you curious about what it truly means to be 'undying' in a healthcare system that treats patients as both survivors and commodities?
Listen to The Undying — Free Audiobook
Loading player...
Key Takeaways from The Undying
- Understand how sharing well-measured love provides a cancer patient with the crucial drive to survive, but must be balanced to avoid overwhelming them with fears of imminent death.
- Discover why a patient's bad mood is completely justified by the physical toll of gruelling treatments and the exhausting societal expectations to remain relentlessly strong.
- Learn the heartbreaking reasons why some loved ones abandon cancer patients to avoid witnessing their pain, and why maintaining true friendships is essential for a sense of purpose.
- Recognize the twofold crisis of a cancer diagnosis—the detection itself and the catastrophic impact of its treatment—where life-saving procedures often make the body feel like it is perishing.
- Realize the vital importance of finding a trustworthy doctor to openly discuss your treatment, helping you avoid the harsh realities of medical misdiagnosis and costly, futile overtreatment.
The Undying — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Anne struggled to grasp her cancer diagnosis. She felt perfectly well, yet medical science insisted she was seriously, even life-threateningly, ill.
Chapter 3: Chemotherapy is a humiliating, degrading, utterly dehumanizing ordeal.
Chapter 4: As a patient, Anne saw that her friends, her doctors, and society at large treated her in profoundly different ways.
Chapter 5: Anne’s mastectomy proved an enraging ordeal.
Chapter 6: Women with breast cancer suffer at the hands of institutions supposedly meant to truly protect them.
Chapter 7: Surviving breast cancer often comes down to luck; it doesn’t actually depend on whether you fit the cancer narrative.
The Undying Summary & Overview
The Undying (2019) is a searing, poetic account of the author’s journey through an aggressive form of breast cancer. It’s also a seething appraisal of women’s experience of this illness, in history and literature, as well as in the present-day United States.
Who Should Listen to The Undying?
- Anyone who has ever suffered illness – from a common cold to cancer
- People interested in class politics
- Lovers of great literature
Books Similar to The Undying
Readers who enjoyed this also liked these titles.
The Unwinding of the Miracle
★ 4.4 / 5 • 172 ratingsA Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After
No Cure for Being Human
★ 4.1 / 5 • 252 ratings(and Other Truths I Need to Hear)
Untamed
★ 3.8 / 5 • 211 ratingsStop Pleasing, Start Living
With the End in Mind
★ 4.3 / 5 • 93 ratingsDying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial