I, Who Did Not Die tells the remarkable true story of an Iranian child soldier, Zahed Haftlang, who showed mercy to an injured enemy soldier, Najah Aboud, and secretly took care of him in the midst of battle. Years later, after surviving prisoner of war camps, the two would cross paths again at a Vancouver medical centre. Journalist Meredith May documents their journey in memoir form.

In her own words, May discusses how she researched the book and wrote from the alternating perspectives of Haftlang and Aboud.

"I flew to Vancouver and stayed there for a month. I interviewed them separately, each for about two weeks, and had an interpreter sit down with us. Zahed speaks Farsi and Najah speaks Arabic. We would sit for about four to five hours, with breaks, but each day every day for two weeks solid.

"Their stories are so dramatic, so cinematic, it was really gripping to listen to them. They're both amazing storytellers. Especially Najah, because he was in prison for 17 years and the way he survived was by telling stories. He was into Bruce Lee and had all the movies memorized, so he would retell the movies in the prison yard and people would gather around. He'd take weeks to tell a movie and embellish it and changed scenes. He was a raconteur, so he was good at telling his own story."

"Interviewing them in person and hanging out with them helped me get to know their personalities. Zahed is impulsive. He's a bit of a trickster. He has always followed his own opinion, even as a kid. He's feisty. The way he speaks is loud and fast and he drives like he's still driving an ambulance on the battlefield. He drives like a maniac.

"Najah is more of a gentleman. He showed me a lot of pictures of his life when he owned the falafel restaurant, before he went to war. He spent a lot of time telling me about the restaurant and all the ladies that would come see him. He was dashing. He's also entrepreneurial. The way he escaped from the Middle East after the war and got to Canada was ingenious.

"I hear them in my mind when I'm writing. I wrote about a chapter a week. One week I'm Zahed. I'm a little staticky when I'm writing, a little frenzied. High caffeine. The next week I'm Najah. I play some jazz and I'm a little more fluid. I was weird to be around while I was writing this book."

"The research was interesting. I'm this middle-aged white lady from northern California and I have to somehow pretend to be an Arabic or a Persian man in the middle of a war in a Muslim country. I was very concerned that it wouldn't be believable writing; that was my biggest fear. I really wanted to do my homework, so I found psychological studies on Iraqi POWs. I found the operation manual for the Russian tanks that Najah drove and read it. There's a movie Zahed watches when he steals money from his father, so I watched that film so I could convey what he liked about it.

"When I was in Vancouver, I had Zahed walk me around and show me where he jumped overboard. He took me to the lobby where he and Najah met again at the end of the book. He took me to the room where he attempted suicide. He showed me where in Stanley Park he was homeless and where he stole food and bicycles. We spent the first day actually just walking around looking at his environment."