Dying

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by Cory Taylor

Cory Taylor is an award-winning Australian novelist who wrote Me and Mr. Booker (winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Pacific Region) and My Beautiful Enemy (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award).

She is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer at the age of sixty. Her condition has progressed to the point that it can no longer be treated. She now weighs less than her neighbor's retriever, as she tells us in her extraordinary last book, Dying: A Memoir.

This powerful and wonderfully written book, written in a few weeks during a creative flurry, is a clear-eyed account of what dying has taught Cory: she explains the complexity of her thoughts, she reflects on her life, and she remembers the lives and deaths of her parents. She explains why she wants to be able to pick her own dying conditions. ‍

Vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, wrath and acceptance are all explored in Dying: A Memoir. It's a moving meditation on death, but it's also a witty and insightful salute to life.