The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
by Anne Boyer.
Picador, 308 pp., $26.00; $17.99 (paper)
There are, according to the sociologist Arthur Frank, three kinds of illness narratives: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative, and the quest narrative. The restitution narrative, he wrote in his influential book The Wounded Storyteller (1995), is the one favored by Western capitalism: it is the story told in the TV commercial urging its recumbent viewer to buy cold medicine or the hospital brochure printed in calming colors; its plot is the ill person healed by the marvels of modern medicine, declaring, “Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again.” The chaos narrative, told from within the period of illness, “imagines life…
