Tuesday, May 03, 2016

Dying Is an art, like everything else

From Text Publishing's May newslertter

Cory Taylor, celebrated author of Me and Mr Booker and My Beautiful Enemy, is dying. She has melanoma-related brain cancer that is no longer treatable. She is sixty years old.
In the space of a few weeks, she wrote Dying: A Memoir, destined to be a classic work on the art of dying; of what we learn in our final days; of the desire to choose the circumstances of one’s own death.

Julian Barnes says of Dying: A Memoir: ‘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. We should all hope for as vivid a looking-back, and as cogent a looking-foward, when we reach the end ourselves.’

Margaret Drabble called it ‘a powerful, poignant and lucid last testament, at once an eloquent plea for autonomy in death, and an evocation of the joys, sorrows and sheer unpredictability and precariousness of life. Taylor wonders if she has found the “right tone” for her story. Her readers will find that she has. It’s a fine contribution to our much-needed dialogue with death.’

Dying: A Memoir is in bookshops from 16 May.

No comments: