Before I Die

Overview

Jenny Downham's novel follows sixteen-year-old Tessa, who has been told she has only months left to live. Rather than spend that time submitting quietly to hospital routines and medication schedules, Tessa draws up a list of things she wants to do before she dies. At the top of it is sex, and the items that follow push her toward experiences she has avoided or been denied precisely because she was sick.

The story moves through Tessa's shrinking world: her father, who is trying to hold the household together; her younger brother, who doesn't fully grasp what is happening; a mother who left and has to be reckoned with again; a best friend who doesn't always know how to help; and a boy who becomes something more than an item to check off a list. Downham lets these relationships shift and strain as Tessa's body weakens, so that the list itself becomes less important than what pursuing it reveals about the people around her.

The novel was adapted into the film Now Is Good, starring Dakota Fanning, which brought Tessa's story to a wider audience beyond its original readership.

A Story Told From Inside the Illness

What sets the book apart from many young-adult stories about death is its refusal to soften Tessa into a symbol of graceful acceptance. She is impatient, sometimes selfish, often funny, and openly angry about what she is losing. The narrative stays close to her physical experience—the exhaustion, the side effects, the indignities of being treated as a patient before she is treated as a person—rather than keeping illness at a comfortable narrative distance.

That closeness extends to Tessa's desire for a normal adolescence, including romantic and sexual experience, which she pursues with a kind of urgency that has little patience for the caution adults around her would prefer. The book has often been read alongside other illness narratives aimed at teen readers, but it is distinguished by how directly it ties mortality to appetite: Tessa doesn't want to be remembered, she wants to feel things while she still can. That framing has made the novel a touchstone in discussions of how young-adult fiction handles both grief and teenage sexuality without treating either as instructive or cautionary.

Why Before I Die Has Been Challenged

Reviewers praised the novel for its unflinching honesty and its refusal to sanitize what a dying teenager might actually want, and it collected recognition from several major review outlets and library associations on those grounds. That same candor is what has drawn objection in schools and libraries: the same scenes admired for emotional truth are, to challengers, evidence that the book is inappropriate for the age group it's shelved for. The novel has been challenged or restricted in 2 states and 5 districts tracked in this catalog.

The core objection centers on Tessa's pursuit of sexual experience, described in enough detail that some parents and administrators consider it explicit content unsuited to a teenage readership, regardless of the narrative context of terminal illness. Related concerns focus on underage drug and alcohol use depicted as part of Tessa's list, and on the book's broader premise—that a dying teenager's priority would be physical pleasure—which some challengers view as promoting behavior rather than depicting a character's response to mortality. Objections have also touched on the novel's frank treatment of family dysfunction, including an absent parent and strained sibling relationships, as further evidence that the book skews too mature for the readers most likely to encounter it in a school library.