Dying: A Memoir

At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor was dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. With her illness no longer treatable, she began at the start of 2016 to write about her experiences and, in an extraordinary creative surge, wrote what would become Dying: A Memoir. This is a brief and clear-eyed account of what dying taught Cory: amid the tangle of her feelings, she reflects on the patterns of her life, and remembers the lives and deaths of her parents. She tells us why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her own death. Dying is about the vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, anger and acceptance that it takes to live a good life and say goodbye to it in peace.

Reviews of Dying: A Memoir

A powerful, poignant and lucid last testament. At once an eloquent plea for autonomy in death, and an evocation of the joys, sorrows and precariousness of life — MARGARET DRABBLE A precise and moving memoir about the randomness of family, and an admirable intellectual response to the randomness of life and death. We should all hope for as vivid a looking-back, and as cogent a looking-forward, when we reach the end ourselves — JULIAN BARNES An amazingly good and valuable book — DIANA ATHILL A fine and sorrowful finale … Something is in her life and in her writing that brings her – and us – painfully and miraculously to a place of grace, perhaps, or gratitude or surrender * Sydney Morning Herald *