I've been working on a memoir for twenty years, and I hope it won't be published posthumously.
But then I don't have cystic fibrosis, the illness that caused Mallory Smith to die at just age 25.
She had been keeping a journal for ten years, including her early memories of running to hide to avoid treatments for her illness.
Thank you to Robin Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times for interviewing Mallory's mother and writing about the memoir that her mother put together from Mallory's journals. It's called Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life.
https://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-mallory-20190308-story.html
One of the most powerful quotations from the book:
“I have a strong urge,” Mallory wrote, “to write something that will change people. I want to create a piece so moving that people are in disbelief. And I want it to be like handing people a pair of glasses, giving them a way of seeing something they didn’t even realize they weren’t seeing.”
The good news is that the last course of treatment seemed to have been working. Doctors injected her lungs with a virus known as a phage (eater) that seemed to have been helping. Since her death, two patients have been helped by this drug.
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