Dying: A Memoir: Cory Taylor on Melanoma, Control, and What the Law Allowed Her

Cory Taylor was an Australian novelist. She was diagnosed with melanoma in 2005, at 50. By 2016 it had spread, including to her brain, and she wrote this book in her final weeks.

Spoilers, said plainly. Taylor died on 5 July 2016, aged 61. The book was published that year by Text Publishing in Melbourne and runs to about 160 pages. It was shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize.

It is not a treatment narrative. There is almost no chemotherapy in it, no scan-by-scan chronology, no fight. What it is instead is an argument, conducted mostly with herself, about whether a dying person is allowed to have any say in how the ending goes, and what it costs to be told they are not.

The tone surprises people. It is dry, plain and frequently funny. She is impatient with euphemism and with the expectation that she will be brave in a particular way. The book is short enough to read in a sitting and specific enough to stay with you longer than that.

The book moves in three broad movements rather than numbered parts.

The first is the present tense of dying: the state of her body, the loss of speech and mobility, the practical indignities, and the fact that she has a drug in the house obtained through a euthanasia organisation and has not taken it. She writes about the strange comfort of possessing an option she may never use.

The second is retrospective. Her parents, her father's long working absences, her mother's decline and death in a nursing home, a childhood spent moving. She is explicit that watching her parents die badly is what formed her views on dying, and she does not pretend the two subjects are separable.

The third is closest to essay. What she thinks about religion and does not believe. Why the medical setting she is in has no vocabulary for what she wants. What it is like to talk to friends who cannot bear the conversation, and to a doctor who changes the subject. There is a short, much-quoted passage about being asked how she is and having no useful answer.

There are no chapters of practical guidance, no resources appendix, and no discussion of drugs or trials. She is not writing to inform.

One more thing about its shape. The book was written under a deadline no editor set, and you can feel it. Sentences are short. Paragraphs stop where a longer book would keep going. Nothing is developed further than it needs to be. The compression is part of what makes it readable at a point when many people cannot read.

It is the best short account in this genre of wanting control and not getting it. She does not present her position as obviously correct. She presents it as hers, and she takes the objections seriously.

It is unusually good on the failure of ordinary conversation. Most dying-related books describe grand set-piece talks. Taylor describes the smaller and more common failure: the friend who cannot say the word, the polite deflection, the way she ends up managing everyone else's discomfort.

And it is good on the fact that a decade of living with a cancer diagnosis is mostly not dramatic. Long stretches of ordinary life, punctuated by scans.

The largest caution is geographic. Taylor was writing in Australia, under Australian law and inside a national health system. She writes about pursuing a chosen death outside the law because there was no lawful route open to her. That has since changed there. Victoria's Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 set up a state process, with eligibility criteria and safeguards. The Victorian Department of Health notes that further amendments passed in November 2025 take effect in 2027. Other Australian states legislated separately.

In the United States, there is no federal assisted dying framework. Where such a route exists it is created by individual state law, with its own eligibility rules, and in most states it does not exist at all. Nothing in this book describes what is or is not available to a US reader, and this page does not offer a view on the ethics. Anyone with questions about their own options should raise them with their own care team, and with a clinician or lawyer licensed where they live.

Cost is the other absence. Taylor is not worried about bills, because in her system she largely did not have to be. A US reader carrying insurance problems alongside advanced cancer will find that whole dimension missing.

The clinical material is also thin and personal by design. It is not a source for how metastatic melanoma is treated now.

Finally, a note on how the book handles her family. Her account of her mother's nursing-home years is unsparing, and her siblings appear mostly at a distance. It is one person's version of a shared history, written by the person with the least time to soften it.

Taylor's melanoma was diagnosed in 2005 and had spread by the end. NCI's melanoma summary lists the risk factors. Fair skin that freckles and burns easily. Exposure to sunlight or tanning beds. A personal or family history of melanoma. Having many moles. And certain other exposures. It also describes the ABCDE pattern of change to notice in a mole: asymmetry, irregular border, colour variation, diameter larger than about 6mm, and evolution over time. A mole that oozes, bleeds or is ulcerated also appears on the list. NCI describes advanced melanoma spreading to the lung, liver, brain, soft tissue, digestive tract and distant lymph nodes, which is the course Taylor's disease took.

On prevention, CDC describes protective measures for when the UV index is 3 or higher: shade during peak hours, clothing covering arms and legs, a wide-brimmed hat, wraparound sunglasses blocking UVA and UVB, and broad-spectrum sunscreen with SPF 15 or higher. CDC also states that indoor tanning exposes users to intense UV rays, a known cause of cancer, and that a base tan is a sign of skin damage rather than protection.

On finding melanoma early, the evidence is thinner than most people expect. USPSTF issued an I statement in April 2023 on visual skin examination by a clinician in asymptomatic adolescents and adults without a personal or family history of skin cancer. An I statement means the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms, and the Task Force specifically flagged missing evidence across skin tones. That is not an argument against seeing a clinician about a changing mole, which is a diagnostic question, not a screening one.

See melanoma symptoms and skin cancer prevention for the detail.

What Taylor wanted, stripped of the legal argument, was for her wishes to be known and followed. There is federal guidance on part of that.

MedlinePlus describes advance directives as legal documents that let you spell out your decisions about end-of-life care ahead of time, and names two main types: a living will, covering treatments such as dialysis, breathing machines, resuscitation and tube feeding, and a durable power of attorney for health care, which names a health care proxy to decide for you when you cannot. Its stated purpose is to tell your wishes to family, friends and health professionals and to avoid confusion later.

NCI describes palliative care as care meant to improve quality of life for people with a serious or life-threatening disease, given with or without curative care, delivered by a multidisciplinary team, and available at any point from diagnosis to the end of life. NCI notes that integrating it soon after an advanced cancer diagnosis improved quality of life and mood in studies. Taylor's book is, among other things, a record of what it feels like when no one raises that early.

See advance care planning and palliative care. Taylor wanted a choice her own country did not offer her. She wrote the book in the weeks she had left to argue for it.

Neither of those things is the same as the choice Taylor was arguing about, and this page is not equating them. But they are the parts of the argument that federal sources actually address, and they are the parts a reader can act on with their own team.

It suits a reader who wants directness and can do without comfort, and someone who has been thinking about control at the end of life and wants intelligent company rather than a position paper.

It does not suit a reader looking for melanoma treatment information, a reader who needs hope held out, or a US reader hoping for a guide to their legal options. On that last point it will mislead if read as practical.

• Dying: A Memoir — edition record, ISBN 9781925355772 (Open Library)
• Dying — Text Publishing title page
• NCI — Melanoma Treatment (PDQ) Patient Version
• CDC — How to Prevent Skin Cancer
• USPSTF — Skin Cancer: Screening
• MedlinePlus — Advance Directives
• NCI — Palliative Care in Cancer
• Victorian Department of Health — Voluntary Assisted Dying

This page discusses Dying: A Memoir for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care.