It became apparent after only a few weeks that Tessa was ill. I just had this idea about two friends who were very different from each other and I started with their voices. I didn’t know Tessa was dying when I began writing. I wanted to write for and about teenagers because they are on the cusp of adulthood and that interests me. It might not all get in the book, but it helps me to know who they are. I keep notebooks for characters, researching them as if I’m going to play them on stage-what they like to eat, what their hopes and fears are. I used all my acting techniques to do it. I’d always written, but began to do so with real commitment now that it was my only creative outlet. When my second child was born I gave up acting-two young children out on the road was too difficult to manage. I spent many years putting myself in imaginary situations and playing all sorts of people I had absolutely nothing in common with and would never normally be cast as. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn’t normally have access to them-in prisons, hospitals, young offender’s units, youth clubs and housing estates.
As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. How did you decide to write a young adult novel, and on this staggeringly difficult subject?Ī. Your author’s bio on “Before I Die” says intriguingly little about your background-only that you live in London and that you were trained in the theater. Downham answered a few questions about the book by e-mail.
In his review, John Burnham Schwartz praises the novel’s “stark interior poetry,” and calls it “unforgettable.” Jenny Downham’s first novel plainly announces its theme in its title: “Before I Die.” The narrator, 16-year-old Tessa, has recently learned that the leukemia she has been living with for four years is now terminal, and the question is: What now? She decides to make a top-10 list of things she wants to do in the time she has left, and enlists her most reliably irresponsible friend, Zoey, to help.
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