"An overwhelming and essential irruption in our discourses on illness and health, art and science, language and literature, mortality and death."
sally rooney

"Told with feverish precision, Boyer's story is just one thread in a book that reflects on the need to find common cause in individual suffering."
Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

A week after her 41st birthday, poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer with a serious prognosis that required very aggressive treatment. As a single mother accustomed to living from day to day and providing care rather than receiving it, the dramatic illness was a crisis, but also a starting point to reconsider mortality and gender policies related to health.

Desmorir is the stark narration of the author's illness and survival process, but it is also a memoir that rebels against the rote genre, a personal account that refuses to limit itself to the individual. Joining the long list of authors who have written about cancer, such as Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag, Boyer reflects furiously, brilliantly and farsightedly on disease and health in our society, addressing issues such as bodily and mental experience of pain, the proliferation of charlatans and opportunists, the abuse of pharmaceutical companies, political cynicism in the public versus private healthcare debate and, in short, the hypocrisy that surrounds the healthcare industry in our world.

A work recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 2020, deeply human and moving, Desmorir is an essential meditation on illness in a capitalist world, and on the miseries and greatness of contemporary life.