![]() 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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