Wild GooseAgency

Gavin Phillips

Dying to Live

When Jewel learns her brain tumour is terminal, she refuses to die without truly living. With her estranged father, she embarks on a cross-country journey—seeking beauty, meaning, and connection in the face of approaching death.
Genre
High concept, coming-of-age, realistic fiction
Rights available
World English / Translation / Film & TV
Audience
New Adult, Adult.
Word count
89,000 approx
Timeline
Present
Setting
A final journey across the USA
Narrative Perspective
Jewel narrates in first person, past tense

Comparables

“The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green

Synopsis


“Dying to Live” is a literary coming-of-age novel about faith, grief, and what it means to truly live when time is no longer assumed. On the morning of her high school graduation, Jewel Michelle Johnson learns that the brain cancer she once beat has returned—this time terminal. Hours before delivering her valedictorian speech, her future collapses into a prognosis measured in months. Instead of surrendering to hospital rooms and percentages, Jewel drafts a cross-country “farewell tour” with her estranged, emotionally guarded father, Roger Johnson—a baseball star who has long hidden his grief and guilt behind career success and alcohol.

Armed with a Bible, a bucket list, and a fierce desire to live honestly until the end, Jewel sets out to repair what’s broken between them. Along the way, she confronts faith and fury, love and regret, confession and forgiveness.

When a hitch-hiker named Jake enters their journey, Jewel discovers that even dying doesn't eliminate the possibility of connection—or hope.

Raw, intimate, and spiritually unflinching, "Dying to Live" asks: If you knew your ending, how would you choose to live?

Author's Note

I started Dying to Live before I published my first book under a pen name. My daughter was the inspiration. Not because the story mirrors our relationship (it most certainly doesn't), but because the bond between a father and daughter carries a weight I wanted to explore.

About thirteen years ago, I began writing it and came close to finishing. Then the idea for my other book took root and demanded my attention, and Dying to Live sat on the shelf for years. I picked it up again in late 2025. Once I got past the cringe of reading what I'd written over a decade earlier, I started revising: subtly in some places, significantly in many others.

At its heart, the story is a study of dying, and of my own mortality. Some of us get to see it coming around the corner; most of us don't. This story is for both. It's about what happens when we let ourselves become vulnerable and settle into love and forgiveness, so that the fear of death loses its grip on whatever time is left.