Garments Against Women

The multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world 
 
'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange: 
 
Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it. 
 
Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects? 
 
I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt. 
 
What do you think would happen? 
 
People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.' 
 
When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

Anne Boyer is a U.S. poet and essayist and, for Garments Against Women, the winner of the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award, a 2018 Whiting Award and the inaugural 2018 Cy Twombly Award. Her other books include The Romance of Happy Workers (2008) and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018). She is the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge for 2018-2019. The Undying, a memoir of cancer treatment and its aftermath, is forthcoming from Penguin in August 2019.

''Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange: 
 
Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it. 
 
Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects? 
 
I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt. 
 
What do you think would happen? 
 
People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.' 
 
When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer is an essential voice, and this is an essential book: one body's urgent attempt at finding a language to tell us what it knows

Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

This is a powerful, timely, and troubling book. Boyer's unflinching account of the market-driven brutality of American cancer care sits beside some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illness and pain that I have ever read

A Meditation on Modern Illness

When Anne Boyer was diagnosed with a highly aggressive form of cancer as a single mother at the age of 41, she found herself plunged into a world in which real bodies are transformed into data points on screens, where hoaxes and misinformation are everywhere, where the criticisms and encouragements visited upon the ill can be as wrong-headed as each other - and where the importance of the art, literature and friendships that persist in the face of suffering was thrown into stark relief. 
 
Her investigation of the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer became an exploration of illness, from the present day back to the insurrectionary lepers and dream diarists of the ancient world; and her exploration of illness in turn grew into 'a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself' (Sally Rooney). 
 
Furious, courageous, endlessly surprising and deeply humane, The Undying is an Illness as Metaphor for the 21st century: a truly brilliant thinker and writer's acclaimed meditation on cancer, the cancer industry, friendship, community and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Anne Boyer

Praise for The Undying

Anne Boyer is an essential voice, and this is an essential book: one body's urgent attempt at finding a language to tell us what it knows

This is a powerful, timely, and troubling book. Boyer's unflinching account of the market-driven brutality of American cancer care sits beside some of the most perceptive and beautiful writing about illnes ...

Books by Anne Boyer

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