Cory Taylor has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Novelist and screenwriter
Australia · 1955–2016
Arts and letters
Australian novelist and screenwriter, whose Me and Mr Booker won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Pacific region and whose My Beautiful Enemy was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. Diagnosed with melanoma in 2005 and told in 2015 that it was no longer treatable, she wrote Dying: A Memoir in a few weeks at the start of 2016. It was published in May; she died in palliative care in Brisbane on 5 July 2016.
6 answers
I move from my bed in my bedroom, to my sofa here in the living room, and basically I stay here and I'm fed delectables all day and that's about it.
How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later. “You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,” he said.
And of course, I wonder why I was not more vigilant about checking my skin, because if I had been, I would have picked up that first melanoma before it turned bad, and saved myself a lot of heartache. When I was first diagnosed, I was angry with myself for being too lazy and stupid to bother with anything but the occasional quick examination. But then I decided that kind of thinking was a waste of my time, because we start dying the moment we are born. I know that now. The knowledge has changed from a first illuminating but soon forgotten premonition into an undeniable lived reality.
As far as I can tell, I’ll either succumb to some opportunistic infection, for which I’ve refused antibiotics in advance, or, having similarly declined forced feeding, I’ll starve to death. ... I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones.
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