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(3.5) “I haven’t died before, so I sometimes get a bad case of beginner’s nerves, but they soon pass.�� Cory Taylor (who died in July) was an Australian novelist first diagnosed with stage-four melanoma in 2005; after the cancer metastasized she underwent brain surgery but the end was clearly approaching. She ordered suicide drugs online but it never came to that; instead, she kept the drugs as a kind of insurance policy lest her philosophical shrugs and general good humor failed her.

In trying to come to terms with dying she met with a psychiatrist (who classified her problem as “adjustment disorder��), Buddhist nuns, and a home-nursing volunteer who came to record her biography but then herself died of a sudden stroke. She also agreed to take part in an episode of the television program “You Can’t Ask That�� in which she would answer the 10 most popular questions sent in by viewers. Though rather clichéd �� Do you have a bucket list? Are you scared? What will you miss the most? �� these questions are a useful way of organizing her thoughts about death in the first part of the book.

Later on she delves into her childhood: a pilot father with a chip on his shoulder; visits to her mother’s home in the Bush; a time living in Fiji; her parents�� divorce and her difficulty keeping up a relationship with her father. I was reminded of Stefan Zweig’s Burning Secret in the section where she talks about her growing adolescent awareness of sex: “Once desire had entered my sights, I started to notice it everywhere, even in my parents, who seemed more vulnerable the closer I looked, susceptible in ways I’d never suspected before, and not in full control of their faculties. Even their bodies appeared ready to betray them at any moment.��

The problem with having lived a nomadic life, Taylor reveals (especially so after she married a Japanese man and spent significant time at a second home in Japan), is that she isn’t sure where “home�� is. Where should her ashes be scattered? Does it matter? Ultimately she decides that whatever is done with her body and effects is more of a decision for her husband and sons to make; it’s up to the living to decide how she will be remembered.

If this memoir is ultimately somewhat fragmentary, that is almost certainly a result of it being written against the clock (within six months, certainly). All the same, I think it succeeds in presenting the trajectory of a life and baring the soul in the face of death.

Favorite passage:

It’s often said that life is short. But life is also simultaneous, all of our experiences existing in time together, in the flesh. For what are we, if not a body taking a mind for a walk, just to see what’s there? �� I am a girl and I am a dying woman. My body is my journey, the truest record of all I have done and seen, the site of all my joys and heartbreaks, of all my misapprehensions and blinding insights. If I feel the need to relive the journey it is all there written in runes on my body. Even my cells remember it, all that sunshine I bathed in as a child, too much as it turned out.