As I Write Dying

As I Write Dying: Memoirs of the End examines the rise of a distinctive literary form: the real-time memoir of terminal illness. Since the 1990s, writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Sacks, Ruth Picardie, and Jenny Diski have chronicled their dying in serialized essays for major periodicals, transforming an intensely private experience into a public narrative shaped by publication cycles and the temporality of reading. These 'memoirs of the end' challenge the philosophical claim that one's own death cannot be narrated, showing how modern medicine and media reconfigure how mortality is lived and understood. Unlike traditional illness narratives oriented toward recovery and survival, they remain in the durational present of dying itself, turning autobiography into autothanatography. Bringing literary analysis into dialogue with philosophy and cultural history, the Element argues that such works make mortality legible again, returning death – and the language of its approach – to the center of modern thought.