(Patient perspective on the health service)
Illness is never neutral, treatment is never free of ideology and mortality is never free of politics, writes Anne Boyer. "Dead" is an attempt to find a language to describe the experience of being ill; it is a profound dialogue with intellectuals who have described their own illness - Elius Aristides, John Donne, Virginia Woolf or Susan Sontag. Boyer analyses who a sick person becomes - or ceases to be - and suggests that cancer can be liberating, can be a simple manual for living that boils down to one thing:
'survive'. It's an intimate diary of her struggle with cancer, written with a dire sense of wellbeing and a lust for real experience, a dense essay firmly rooted in mythology, pop culture and feminism. It is also a merciless critique of neoliberal healthcare, 'pink ribbon culture' and media favouritism for those who 'survived' by managing themselves and their illness properly.
Excerpt from publisher's description