A meteor named Anne Boyer

I read the book in bed, in the

, in my study, in a plaza in Buenos Aires until a

He thinks I'm there to steal his cats, he yells at me, throws water at me, I pick up my things, I go and, when I get in the car, the first thing I do is keep reading because while the woman was screaming in anger I didn't think about the possibility that it could be done or hurt me except in the anger that it produced in me that it had torn me out of the state of reading possession in which I found myself. I read it when I wake up, when I travel by taxi, after dinner. I read it silently and aloud (to people who withdraw as if they were at a dissecting table with knives at the ready), without calm, in a state of exhausting inspiration: each extraordinary adjective, each complex and perfect phrase, makes me feel powerful and definitive, they give me a physical, almost sexual urge to write. I don't know anything about the author, except for details: she's alive, she's American,She was born in 1973, she is a poet, her name is Anne Boyer. The book, which won the Pulitzer in 2020, was published by Sexto Piso with a translation by Patricia González de Jesús. Its titled

. The subtitle is

I do not think it is a reflection: it is an attack. Already in the first chapter I knew that I had been impacted by something of sidereal dimensions and that this shock would be total and unseemly. A week after her 41st birthday, Boyer was diagnosed with breast cancer that required treatment as aggressive as the disease. From that experience, he wrote this. But although cancer is at the center, and Boyer at the center of that center,

is not a testimonial book, nor a memoir, nor an essay. It is something closer to

lurid by Marina Abramovic - the Serbian artist who has made an exploration of pain out of her work - than to the saga of works on the disease - Sontag, etc. -, in the midst of which

looks like a poisonous cobra among warm kittens. Here cancer is a matter of those who are sick and those who are not, of those who will undergo chemotherapy and those who will not. "Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born," he writes, and that is the kind of bitter substance that permeates the book: the discomfort of being alive. If what Boyer writes were a prayer, it would be an insulting prayer but with great aspirations. Sing to the living body and the diseased body with life-giving sarcasm. I come across a headline: "Attitude is everything to a breast cancer survivor." I am looking for the headline: “Attitude is everything for an Ebola patient” (…), or “Attitude is everything for a gunshot wounded” (…) or “Attitude is everything for coral reefs in danger of extinction". Charge against self-help,commiseration, the pink ribbon, the United States health system —which considers her double mastectomy an outpatient procedure— and, replete to the brim with narrative resources (“Pull your hair out by the handful in places that generate social anxiety: Sephora, the family court, the Bank of America, in any place where you carry out paid work ”), produces an angry work, the rebellion of a human animal in a society that has no tools to deal with death except the simulacrum - that's not going to happen— or medication: this will keep you from dying even if it makes you feel like dead. “You feel like a kind of animal that is melancholy and that looks at any object and yearns to be that instead of itself, it yearns to be (…) a silver-plated fork, or a machete hanging on a wall,it yearns to be anything (…) that is not a sick and abandoned animal, it yearns to be anything in the world except that which was once loved and which has now been left alone ”. Boyer avoids the personal anecdote, and hardly any information about her existence appears: we only know that she is single, that she has a daughter, friends. And it achieves something that is unlike anything. A book on cancer that is a book about the devastation that life produces. I read a little every day. As if he had been dying. To resurrect.A book on cancer that is a book about the devastation that life produces. I read a little every day. As if he had been dying. To resurrect.A book on cancer that is a book about the devastation that life produces. I read a little every day. As if he had been dying. To resurrect.