Infinite Life - by Annie Baker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A funny and profound meditation on the complexity of chronic illness and the ache of desire.

How far would you go to heal? For five women at a clinic in Northern California, deprivation seems to be the only answer to heal their bodies from a litany of afflictions--cancers and autoimmune disorders and thyroid conditions and mysterious infections. To distract themselves from the near-constant pain they are in, they philosophize and swap book recommendations, confide intimate family stories, and share hopes for their future recoveries. Over the course of several days, the clinic becomes a purgatorial space, where prolonged hunger and suffering seem to warp time itself. Infinite Life is an engrossing and compassionate play that resists easy answers to the problem of what it means to reside in a body that fails you.

Review Quotes

Despite the peachy terra-cotta-and-breeze-block patio that keeps Infinite Life's characters fenced in, Baker's play feels capacious--ever widening its arms to hold more humanity, more searching spirit and more troubled flesh.
--Vulture

A lucid fever dream, a trippy vision of profound truth, an exploration of how desire and pain influence and are influenced by the feeble bags of meat our consciousnesses are bound to. It is another extraordinary play from a writer seemingly capable of nothing else.
--Time Out London

[Infinite Life] peeps at the greatest mysteries of life--in this case principally pain and desire, and what they have in common--through the tiny, seemingly inconsequential windows of banal human behavior.
--New York Times

[Baker] communicates the incommunicable not by making us feel physical anguish, obviously, but by loaning us the eerie suspension her characters experience as extreme hunger detaches them from their bodies. The Baker affect lets us drift with them, temporally; we sense time slipping away in unpredictable chunks. She makes us feel their tense stoicism, which is just one sensation removed from feeling their agony.
--The New Yorker

Enthralling, strange, mordant, witty, jolting, mysterious.
--The Daily Beast

About the Author

Annie Baker's plays include The Antipodes, The Flick (Pulitzer Prize), John, The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and Infinite Life. Her plays have been produced at more than two hundred theaters throughout the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwright Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Baker's debut film Janet Planet, written and directed by Baker, premiered at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, followed by a screening at the 2023 New York Film Festival. It received a wide release in 2024 from A24 Films and received three nominations at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards: Best First Feature, Best First Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.