When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone by Philip Gould: review Over dinner with Tony Blair, Gould confessed to feeling lost. He had done everything required of him. Why had the cancer returned? Blair's response was remarkable: "The cancer is not done with you, it wanted more. You may have changed but not by enough, now you have to go on to a higher spiritual level. You have to use this recurrence to find your real purpose in life. This Messianic statement resonated powerfully with Gould. Throughout his final year he sought meaning in his death. Death is not frightening if you accept it. It is a time for immense change and transformation, a time to fulfil yourself and others, and a chance in a small way to change the world. Accordingly, he began a "huge process of reckoning" in which he examined and repaired his relationships with his family and friends; he chose his burial plot in Highgate Cemetery and made a short film in which he spoke about his death while standing beside his grave, and he grasped the opportunity to confront the process of dying. "I do not suppose there are many people in the world who know they have fewer than three months to live, who are trying to articulate what it feels like as I am doing now," he wrote. In this supposition he was partly mistaken. Other writers in similar circumstances - most recently the critic and illustrator Tom Lubbock - have described the experience of living on close terms with death. Such bulletins from the front line of mortality are essentially a description of the writer's individual stratagems for handling his own imminent extinction. In the case of Lubbock, whose mind was keenly analytical and meditative, the result was a book that reflected his distinctive qualities, and so it is with Gould. After his terminal diagnosis, his book shifts perspective from beating cancer to, in effect, rebranding death. He addresses with candour the pain and fear of his physical dissolution, but concludes that "there is no question I am having the most fulfilling time of my life." It is problematic, for both literary and emotional reasons, to evaluate a memoir such as Gould's. In part it is a collective document: the newspaper editor Keith Blackmore, who provides an introduction, edited the chapter titled The Death Zone from Gould's notes and his filmed interview, and there are afterwords by Gail Rebuck, his daughter Georgia, and also the text of a final email sent by Alastair Campbell, which was read at Gould's funeral. Gould's was a political life, and that is reflected in his writing. But as with any memoir, it is when the author abandons his public mask and allows us a glimpse of the private man that his book becomes most powerful. The energy that Gould put into the business of dying was remarkable. His reward was the good death he wished for; his epitaph this account of a life's intensity concentrated into a few months. When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone by Philip Gould 240PP, Little, Brown t £12.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £14.99, ebook £6.99)