It’s a rule of mine not to get involved with dying people. She sees me staring and smiles, but I’m not having any of that.
She’s penciled fake eyebrows in above the line of her glasses. “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. 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. 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. This is how Tessa begins her story, which is to say, begins the ending of her story. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger.” 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.” 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. As in every perception, every particle of one girl’s desire, regret, rage, lust, light, darkness, right to the end.Īnd what a girl Tessa is, trapped in her failing body, in an unnamed English town. 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.īefore I die: as in right up to the moment when.
Yes, a book, a first novel no less, about a 16-year-old girl dying of leukemia. 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.
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