And while Dying: A Memoir is a deeply affecting meditation on death, it is also a funny and wise tribute to life. Taylor’s last words offer a vocabulary for readers to speak about the most difficult thing any of us will face. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Me and Mr. Written in the space of a few weeks, in a tremendous creative surge, this powerful and beautiful memoir is a clear-eyed account of what dying teaches: Taylor describes the tangle of her feelings, remembers the lives and deaths of her parents, and examines why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her death. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. As her body weakens, she describes the experience-the vulnerability and strength, the courage and humility, the anger and acceptance-of knowing she will soon die.

Her illness is no longer treatable: she now weighs less than her neighbor’s retriever. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2017Īt the age of sixty, Cory Taylor is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. Every human should read it.” - The New York TimesĪ New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and 2017 Critics’ Pick Agent: Nathaniel Jacks, Inkwell Management. Unfortunately, the characters, although well-drawn, are forgettable, and the novel leaves only impressions of discontent. Taylor’s straightforward prose captures the nuances of being at an age where you cannot see the differences between being a teenager and being an adult. Meanwhile, her mother throws parties to “get her through the weekends” and her father becomes increasingly unstable, prompting the return of her aloof older brother, Eddie. After years of watching her father manipulate her mother and having an outsider status at school, Martha feels like her life has finally begun.

Booker, a smooth-talking Englishman, who, fueled by mutual feelings of being trapped and bored with life, begins an affair with her made all the easier by his wife’s proclivity for falling asleep in a boozy haze. Like the town’s other residents, she drinks copiously and waits for something to happen that will give color to her humdrum life. “Everyone in it was like me, trying to move on and start something, anything at all, even if it was almost certain to go bad,” explains 16-year-old narrator Martha. Restlessness pervades Taylor’s debut novel of suburban claustrophobia and the difficulty of cutting ties to even an unhappy home.

Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor