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?

Teaser

My unrolled diploma lay at my feet, the corners soft and peeling. It read, in the careful script of the university seal, “Chatham College. This certifies that Jewel Michelle Johnson has fulfilled her requirements with honours…” and then the rest of the sentence trailed away into the roll.
I turned eighteen this year. An hour ago I stood at that podium and gave the valedictory speech. Now I’m planted on a leather chair in the Ritz-Carlton lobby, a notebook in my lap, trying to turn the last few hours into sentences. It’s a mess. The speech feels like a bright, precise thing that happened to someone else. The rest of me is in a quieter place, not calm exactly, more like a steady, clinical numbness: quiet chaos.
I was valedictorian. Hours before I walked out to applause, Dr. Bradley told me I’m going to die in a few months. Even writing that line feels surreal. “You’re going to die in a few months”, the words are a kind of anesthesia. At 10:13 this morning, with Dad squeezed into the chair beside me, the doctor said my cancer is advanced, my options are limited. Translation: there’s nothing more we cando. He called it, in the blunt language of white coats, ‘terminal.’ I’ve started to call that instant my “Life News Flash.”