Dying: A Memoir

. Cory Taylor was an award-winning novelist and screenwriter who also published short fiction and children’s books. She died on July 5, 2016, shortly after Dying: A Memoir was published in Australia. Her first novel, Me and Mr. Booker, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Pacific Region) in 2012 and her second novel, My Beautiful Enemy, was shortlisted for

It should be required reading for all of us.” - Ann Hood“This small, powerful book offers a clean engagement with life’s conclusion: with clarity and courage, the author finds words to escort us towards silence.” - Hilary Mantel“Cory Taylor's book is both a precise and moving memoir about the randomness of family, and an admirable intellectual response to the randomness of life and death. It is full of wisdom and vulnerability; it is also profoundly reassuring. Dying, she repeatedly says, is deeply lonely. No one can do it with you. We should all hope for as vivid a looking-back, and as cogent a looking-forward, when we reach the end ourselves.” - Julian Barnes“This is a powerful, poignant and lucid last testament, at once a

If 'Dying' is to be Cory Taylor's final public writing, it is difficult to imagine a finer note on which to close. What do you do if you're dying slowly of a melanoma-related brain cancer? If you're a writer, like Brisbane-based Cory Taylor, you write a book about it, and all the rest of us can do is soak in the relentlessly true, beautiful and moving words that result. Structured around three long essays, Taylor writes of how her body has failed her since the initial diagnosis in 2005, just before her 50th birthday. While her once full life has since contracted to just two rooms – her bedroom . Jennifer Cameron-Smith said ‘The fact that I was dying now was sad, but not tragic. I had lived a full life.’. At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor was dying of a melanoma-related brain cancer. Her cancer could no longer be treated, and death was inevitable. And so, she wrote this book. I imagine that every person who reads it comes away with something slightly different. For me, it’s Cory Taylor’s reflections on her life, and her observations about the deaths of her parents. So many echoes, too, in her thoughts about being able to choose the circumstances of her death. I’ve lost tw. Honest, profound and deeply moving Cloggie Downunder “…I will miss being around to see what happens next, how things turn out, whether my children’s lives will prove as lucky as my own. But I will not miss dying. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done, and I will be glad when it’s over”Dying: a Memoir is Cory Taylor’s last book. Cory writes that she is sixty years old and dying of a melanoma-related brain cancer, and says: “…in this, my final book: I am making a shape for my death,

"Bracing and beautiful Every human should read it." The New York TimesAt the age of sixty, Cory Taylor is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. As her body weakens, she describes the experiencethe vulnerability and strength, the courage and humility, the anger and acceptanceof knowing she will soon die.Written in the space of a few weeks, in a tremendous creative surge, this powerful and beautiful memoir is a clear-eyed account of what dying teaches: Taylor describes the tangle of her feelings, remembers the lives and deaths of her parents, and examines why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her death.Taylor’s last words offer a vocabulary for readers to speak about the most difficult thing any of us will face. Her illness is no longer treatable: she now weighs less than her neighbor’s retriever. And while Dying: A Memoir is a deeply affecting meditation on death, it is also a funny and wise tribute to life.