Novels for young teenagers do not usually feature drugs and casual sex within
the first 20-odd pages.
But most books for teenagers will not leave an adult reader’s eyes so blurry
with tears that it’s hard to see the final chapters. Jenny Downham’s
extraordinary first novel does both. Before I Die is the story of Tessa, a
16-year-old with leukaemia who has a to-do list to complete before she dies.
Number one is losing her virginity. The rest of the list is no less
controversial.
As a first novel by an unknown author, Before I Die is also remarkable for the
stir it has created among publishers and the speed with which it arrives in
bookshops. Downham wrote the final full stop in February; the book will be
on sale next month. It was snapped up by David Fickling, whose previous
triumphs include publishing most of Philip Pullman’s novels. Foreign rights
were sold in 11 languages in two weeks, and the book is tipped to replicate
the success of Mark Haddon’s debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Nighttime, the tale of an autistic 15-year-old that transcended its
classification as a children’s book to top bestseller charts for weeks when
it came out in 2004.
The sensation surrounding Before I Die has surprised nobody more than Downham
herself. She was, until a few months ago, a single mother living on benefits
in a down-at-heel part of Hackney, east London. 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 – or not yet. So
quickly has her book been rushed into print, she has yet to receive a penny
of her advance. But her unassuming manner makes it hard to imagine she will
transform into a ribbon-cutting celeb, however many copies she sells.
Eloquent and engaging, she has the clear voice one might expect of a former
actress, albeit an unknown one – she left a touring improvised-theatre
company when pregnant with her second son, deciding that travelling 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.
Having to improvise plays for reluctant audiences is what Downham credits with
teaching her to create characters and tell stories. It also revealed
teenagers’ interests. “Whenever we turned up at a youth club, we’d ask,
‘What do you want to see a show about?’ They’d always say sex, then they’d
say drugs, so we’d have to find a way of doing that.”
Downham’s realistic, honest treatment of such tricky topics sets her novel
apart from teen magazines’ glamorous but often censorious and patronising
approach. She does not shrink from telling the reader when Tessa gets
pleasure from her taboo and even illegal experiences, but she does not hide
their downsides, either. “I don’t think my job as a writer is to moralise,”
she says. “If I was setting out to write a book telling young people how to
behave, they wouldn’t read it. I didn’t want to make judgments about what
Tessa decides to do, but to show that any choice has consequences. I hope
readers will get enough information to ask themselves, ‘If that was me, what
would I do?’ As I wrote the sex scenes, it did cross my mind that what I was
writing might not be allowed to go into the book. But then I thought, ‘I
don’t care – let them tell me what isn’t allowed once it’s finished.’ And
they didn’t tell me to change them, so there they are.”
Although she read memoirs by adults with cancer, and showed her manuscript to
nurses at Great Ormond Street, Downham decided not to interview any dying
children. “I felt that if I talked to an ill teenager, I would feel
compelled to write their story exactly as it was for them. And I didn’t want
to serve just one person’s story. I wanted to write a story about mortality
and about growing up, which Tessa has to do in a very short space of time.”
If, as the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies observed, “there is absolutely
no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel you must write that
book, or else go mad, or die”, then Downham had every right to pick up a
pen. “I did feel like I went a bit mad when I gave up acting,” she says. “My
oldest son was four at the time, and I’d always be trying to get him to play
imaginative games with me. I can clearly remember saying to him, ‘Let’s play
doctors! I’ll be all the different people coming in, and I’ll put the
dressing up stuff on.’ And he’d say, ‘Mum, I’m reading! I don’t want to!’ I
didn’t know what to do with the playful energy that I’d been using every day
as an actor.Writing began as an outlet for that. I’d write when the baby was
asleep and the older one was at school. I didn’t think I was starting a
novel. I just knew that it was helping me.”
She is reluctant to be portrayed as another JK Rowling, saved from poverty by
literary triumph: if she sat in cafés to write, it was because she liked the
atmosphere, not because she couldn’t afford to heat her home. But she does
not want to give her young audience or her unpublished peers the impression
that her success is of the “instant, Big Brother, get-rich-quick variety”.
It took, she emphasises without self-pity, years of sacrifice and tough
decisions.
“I did feel guilty about the fact that I wasn’t earning money,” she says. “But
being poor was to a certain extent a choice. 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.
“I never set out to be my kids’ salvation by writing a bestseller. I’ve never
really had any money, so I don’t know what I’ll spend it on if the book does
sell. If the past six months hadn’t happened, I guess I would have carried
on writing, and eventually I would have had six unpublished novels sitting
at home.” Downham’s plans for celebrating the success she is forecast are
hardly the stuff of fairy tales – no surprise, given the clear-eyed way in
which her novel confronts both terrible and wonderful experiences. “It will
be lovely to take the boys out for a meal,” she says. “It will be lovely to
go and do that without thinking about it.”
Before I Die is published on July 5 by David Fickling Books, at £10.99. Available
at the Sunday Times Books First price of £9.99 (inc p&p) on 0870
165 8585
