It’s an interesting feeling to pick up a book when you know how it ends.

When I agreed to write a review of Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life by Mallory Smith I wasn’t thinking about that part. So, when the book arrived and there on the cover was a picture of a very alive-looking person doing a headstand, I was hit with a gut-punch realizing I’d promised to write a review about a book by a person who was already dead.

Mallory Smith dies at the end of her book. Mallory Smith is dead.

Now that you know how it ends, too, read it you must! Because it’s 303 pages full of a quarter century of life that was not wasted.

Here’s a deeper reason: it’s achingly human. Salt in My Soul is a raw, unfiltered coming of age story with all the things you’d expect of a child growing up in the ’90s and 2000s through the lens of being sick, incurable, and ultimately terminal. This book inserts humanness and normalcy into sickness, with an inside glimpse into the inner-workings of the mind of a girl growing up, living, and dying with cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis, from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, is “a progressive, genetic disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits the ability to breathe over time.”

I do not have cystic fibrosis, but I do live with an incurable, progressive disease. I knew I would find Mallory’s story relatable, so I jumped at the chance to read a first-person narrative of life with a disease I’m still learning about. Plus, I love memoirs.

While Salt in My Soul summarizes a life with good periods of health punctuated by unpredictable emergencies and long hospital stays that get longer and closer together as Mallory tacks years on – her doctors becoming like family – the thing that resonates most is this: people living with incurable progressive diseases tend to show a superhero-strong shell, yet live complex and difficult lives on the inside. And Mallory gives us a brave glimpse of the inside. Continue reading Book Review: Salt in My Soul →