Diary of a Dying Girl is a collection of Mallory Smith’s real, unflinching diary entries about slowly dying of a terminal illness. It is an unparalleled exploration of the human spirit and what it means to truly live. Here are just a few of the inspiring quotes from the book interspersed with photos from Mallory’s life.
I write because I want my parents to understand me. I write to leave something behind for them, for my brother, Micah, for my boyfriend, Jack, and for my extended family and friends, so I won’t just end up as ashes scattered in the ocean and nothing else.
Curiously, the things I write in my journal are almost all bad: the letdowns, the uncertainties, the anxieties, the loneliness. The good stuff I keep in my head and heart, but that proves an unreliable way of holding on because time eventually steals all memories—and if it doesn’t completely steal them, it distorts them, sometimes beyond recognition, or the emotional quality accompanying the moment just dissipates.
Many of the feelings I write about are too difficult to share while I’m alive, so I am keeping everything in my journal password-protected until the end. When I die I want my mom to edit these pages to ensure they are acceptable for publication—culling through years of writing, pulling together what will resonate, cutting references that might be hurtful. My hope is that my writing will offer insight for people living with, or loving someone with, chronic illness.
I want to live and I want people the world over affected with illness, ridden with deadly diseases, to live, to survive, to thrive, and to reproduce, creating imperfect little perfects. I want us to be viewed as worthy enough to pass on our genes, even if we’d be outcompeted by those whose genome is “better” in a world where natural selection still reigned supreme.
My life is a miracle. Life in general is a miracle. Our existence is the result of stars exploding, solar systems forming, our Earth having an environment hospitable to life, and then, finally, millions of highly improbable events accumulating over millions of years to bring us, a capable and conscious bag of stardust, to the here and now.
