Jenny Downham
publisher
David Fickling Books/Random House
format
Paperback
pages
336
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
My dear friend Lindsay McWhorter, a charge nurse on the oncology floor of Greenwich Hospital, read this book and said it is extraordinary -- searing, unsentimental, and honest. At the same time, it is a shocking affirmation of life. Sixteen year old Tessa has leukemia; she makes a list of ten things she wants to do in her last few months, and the first of these is to have sex. But Tessa discovers that getting what you want doesn’t always give you what you need. Sometimes the most unexpected things become the most important. Jenny Downham is a formidable writing talent, and BEFORE I DIE celebrates what it is to be alive by confronting what it’s like to die. There’s lots here for your book group to discuss; my Literary Ladies Book Group did.- ESB
__________________________
Tessa has just months to live. Fighting back against hospital visits,
endless tests, and drugs with excruciating side effects, Tessa compiles
a list. It’s her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is Sex.
Released from the constraints
of “normal” life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up.
Tessa’s feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her
estranged mother, her best friend, and her new boyfriend, are all
painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa’s time
finally runs out.
First time author Jenny Downham has caused quite a stir with Before I Die, a novel targeted at teens with crossover appeal for adults in general. Publisher David Fickling (part of Random House), who also publish The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, are so enthusiastic about the book that it has been rushed to press in a fraction of the time normally taken, and foreign rights have been sold in at least 11 languages .
According to a June 2007 article in the London Times, written a month before Before I Die published in the UK, nobody is more surprised by the buzz surrounding the book than Downham herself, a single mother living on benefits in a down-at-heel part of Hackney, east London. The Times describes her as "a small, slim 43-year-old, dressed inconspicuously in jeans and a blue anorak, she would attract few second glances when walking her sons, aged 12 and 7, to school. Her brown hair pulled back in a scruffy, utilitarian bunch, a lick of mascara her only visible make-up, she does not play the literary star."
As a reader, Downham enjoys the works of Raymond Carver, reads a lot of poetry and loves reading plays. Described as "eloquent and engaging", she left a touring improvised-theatre company in 1999 when her eldest son was four, six weeks before her second son was born, deciding that traveling the country in the back of a transit van to put on plays in youth clubs, prisons and mental hospitals didn’t fit with motherhood. She credits her ability to create characters and tell stories to having to improvise plays for reluctant audiences. When the company would turn up at a youth club, they would ask the audience what they wanted to see a show about, and the response inevitably included sex and drugs, so they would improvise from there.
She started writing to use up some of the "playful energy" she'd been used to expending as an actor. She says, "I didn’t think I was starting a novel. I just knew that it was helping me." She didn't set out to write a book about a teenager dying of cancer. In a short interview with Entertainment Weekly she says, "I started with the voice. I didn't know Tessa was dying, she just seemed to be very sad and angry, and I wasn't sure why. After six months it became apparent. Also, when the London bombings happened [in July 2005], it struck me that so many people I knew were affected. Life becomes very concentrated and it really impacted the writing. I realized that when you put the clock ticking, in many ways you highlight the narrative drive."
She read memoirs written by adults with cancer such as Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor and Anatole Broyard's Intoxicated by My Illness, she did lots of research into cancer and shared her manuscript with nurses at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London (which specializes in treating cancers in young children), but she decided not to interview any dying children feeling that if she did so she'd be compelled to write their story exactly as it was for them - instead she wanted to write a story about mortality and about growing up.
Although it would seem that she is to be saved from poverty by her literary efforts, Downham is reluctant to be labeled as the next J.K. Rowling. She is concerned that her audience do not see her success as the "instant, Big Brother, get-rich-quick variety" - because it wasn't quick and took considerable self-sacrifice. Having said that, she also points out that being poor was to an extent a choice saying, "I could have got a nine-to-five job, but I thought I was a better parent doing something I love. Feeding the boys rice or jacket potatoes every day for tea really isn’t so terrible. But the lack of money became more of an issue when my older son started secondary school. At that age, you start to notice if you don’t have the things that other people have."
She's currently at work on a new book which she says has "a voice, a location, and seems to be for young adults, but I don't really know what it's about."
Beyond the book
A Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book of the Year
A Booklist Editors’ Choice
A Book Sense Children’s Pick
A Kirkus Reviews Editors’ Choice
A Publishers Weekly Flying Start Author
An ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults
From The NYT Book Review:
October 14, 2007
CHILDREN'S BOOKS/YOUNG ADULT
By JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ
BEFORE I DIE
By Jenny Downham.
327 pp. David Fickling Books/Random House. $15.99. (Ages 14 and up)
If it sometimes seems as though the world is killing itself - the papers are full of spectacular evidence - here, between covers, is something to live for. Yes, a book, a first novel no less, about a 16-year-old girl dying of leukemia. This may sound too depressing for words, but it is only one indication of the inspired originality of "Before I Die," by Jenny Downham, that the reader can finish its last pages feeling thrillingly alive.
Before I die: as in right up to the moment when. As in every perception, every particle of one girl's desire, regret, rage, lust, light, darkness, right to the end.
And what a girl Tessa is, trapped in her failing body, in an unnamed English town. But then, she would have to be someone remarkable, wouldn't she, to make us want to be inside her head with her, horribly alone, yet also strikingly free. It is in the quality of that freedom that Downham proves her abundant gifts as a writer, by showing us, in a stark interior poetry that never turns its back on the external world, what it is to face death honestly, as Tessa thinks, "before I've even lived properly."
"I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger."
This is how Tessa begins her story, which is to say, begins the ending of her story. Here is a girl who wants, and because her time is limited, her wanting has a greater intensity than your average teenager (or, for that matter, adult) will ever know. An intensity that, over the years, has sunk any number of novels written by well-intentioned authors who have mistaken a tragic situation for genuine tragedy and a vague sentimentality for real feeling.
As ever, the difference between the two types of writing lies in the particular. Making her "scrawls of desire" on the wall by her bed like a prisoner in her cell, compiling her list of 10 things to do before she dies, Tessa is our Virgil, with the significant difference that, unlike Dante's guide, she doesn't know the dark place to which she is leading us any better than we do. On the plus side, she's a lot funnier than old Virgil was, and - here I'm guessing - considerably more interested in having sex. Since she is not yet a ghost, she is also more vulnerable, contradictory, human.
"The usual suspects are here - the hat gang in the corner plugged into their portable chemo and talking about diarrhea and vomiting; a boy clutching his mum's hand, his fragile new hair at the same stage as mine; and a girl with no eyebrows pretending to read a book. She's penciled fake eyebrows in above the line of her glasses. She sees me staring and smiles, but I'm not having any of that. It's a rule of mine not to get involved with dying people. They're bad news."
Tessa herself is bad news, in her own way; but then so are the other people in her life, those intimates who have come this far with her on her sinking little raft but will soon have to jump ship, since only she can go on to the end. There's sweet, decent, brokenhearted Dad, whose survival drug is earnest denial. There's selfish, ineffectual Mum, who left them four years earlier and still seems several steps removed from the messy playing field of emotional responsibility. "How can I feel older than my own mother?" Tessa wonders. "I close my eyes so I don't have to see her fail." There's Tessa's younger brother, Cal, who gives his sister a book called "A Hundred Weird Ways to Meet Your Maker" and says helpful things like "When Tessa dies, can we go on holiday?" There's her best friend, Zoey, a rampaging narcissist in a minidress. And there's Adam, the boy next door, recently made fatherless, who gardens and rides a motorcycle and looks after his grieving mother, yet who is not conventionally handsome, not perfect (perfection being not what Tessa's after, since it is, probably, not life).
Of all the things on Tessa's ever changing, ever growing list of things to do before she dies, falling in love with Adam and receiving his love in return is the experience she most hungers for, one that could alter the very fabric of living.
"I mostly believe in chaos," Tessa tells us. "If wishes came true, my bones wouldn't ache as if all the space inside them is used up. There wouldn't be a mist in front of my eyes that I can't brush away. But watching Adam walk up the path feels like a choice. The universe might be random, but I can make something different happen."
When love does finally happen, it feels to Tessa (and, by the end of this unforgettable novel, to the reader) like a gift worth any sacrifice imaginable, even death. All the way through, Downham gives Tessa the power to tell her own truth, to represent her imperfect, all-too-human self, as well as the imperfect, all-too-human selves of those around her, without regard to the opinions and values of others. The result is as honest and indelible a portrait of a young adult at risk - no, beyond risk - as one is likely to find in recent literature. One of the more surprising revelations to be found in "Before I Die" is that it's a "young adult novel" only in the sense that readers Tessa's age are perhaps the ideal audience for a true story about death.
I don't care how old you are. This book will not leave you.