Dying: A Memoir - Hardcover

Cory Taylor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1782119760 ISBN 13: 9781782119760

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2016

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 STELLA PRIZE

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.

About this title

Review:

"Unsparing in its insights and observations, breathtaking in its courage and generosity. A thing of lightness and beauty" (Guardian)

"Serves as a reminder, amid the omnishambles of today's world, that life is transient and death final . . . Her luminous voice, touching on the fragility of life, the randomness of death . . . is one worth listening to" (The Times)

"A manual for the discussion of death, full of wisdom, vulnerability and reassurance . . . For all of Cory Taylor's acceptance of the inevitable, Dying contains a will to live on, and a conviction that for as long as we are remembered, we remain present" (Times Literary Supplement)

"Lucid, precise, unsentimental prose . . . its clear-sighted compassion might have something to teach any mortal" (Irish Times)

"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)

"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 inquiry into western society's dysfunctional relationship with mortality, and a luminous account of one writer's search for a good death of her own" (Guardian)

"Brave and funny, rare and honest, it sees her address everything from suicide (she considers it) to a bucket list (she doesn't have one; she's happy with what she's done in her life) . . . Beautiful" (The Bookseller, July Book of the Month)

"An amazingly good and valuable book" (DIANA ATHILL)

"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)

Book Description:

A deeply moving meditation on dying, and a joyful and wise tribute to life, shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1782119760
• ISBN 13: 9781782119760
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160