Dakshana Bascaramurty is a reporter for the Globe and Mail. Her work has also appeared in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and on CBC.

This Is Not the End of Me is her first book. It's the story of Layton Reid, a young man who lived a life full of adventure and risks — until he was diagnosed with cancer. He changed his life, got married and started a family. And when the cancer returned, Layton did everything he could to find a cure, including risky alternative therapies.

Eventually, he comes to terms with the fact that his life is going to end sooner than he'd like and he focuses on making sure his young son is ready for life without his father.

Bascaramurty spoke to CBC Books about how she wrote This Is Not the End of Me.

"I had a very unusual start to my relationship with Layton in that I was a client of his. I hired him to shoot my wedding in Halifax back in 2012. He lived in Halifax and we had an incredibly fun day hanging out the day that I got married and logged many, many hours together. I actually spent more time with him than I spent with my husband.

"I went back to my life in Toronto, he went back to his life and a year later I heard from him. He emailed me and a couple of his former clients and he revealed that he had stage four melanoma. But I knew that he was due to have a child in a couple of months, as well. I replied to this email and it just sparked this ongoing communication between us, where I was asking a lot of questions. He told me that, while he was about to become a father but also had this very serious illness, he wanted to start documenting it in some way, whether that was through a blog or through some kind of journal.

"He knew that I was a professional writer and journalist with the Globe and Mail. He asked me for guidance on how he might best do this. And so we started having these Skype conversations and I was giving him writing prompts and doing interviews with him in hopes of getting his creative juices flowing. But the unexpected result of that was me seeing this incredibly interesting and complex story that this man was going through these kinds of two major life changes at once.

"I realized it was a story that I wanted to tell, and he was game for it. He was unusually open in terms of journalistic sources. But I have never met anybody quite like him. His family seemed open to letting me into their life for some time, too. So that's where it began."

"I started what I thought might turn into a long form feature or a magazine piece way back in 2013. So I started writing it not really knowing where it would be placed or how long it would be. I just knew that there was a story here that I needed to cover and I could figure out those details later.

"I never quite knew when to stop reporting and when to start writing. And in 2014 I went to the Banff Centre and I did a literary journalism residency and I worked on this piece. I workshopped it for a month with some really talented writers and editors. I wound up with a piece that was very much publishable. But I still had this feeling that the reporting wasn't done yet.

"I made some attempts to get it placed. But all the while I was still reporting and adding to it and and constantly changing it. Years passed and it never ran anywhere. I had a meeting with a former colleague who I knew had worked in magazines. I wanted to get some advice on how to pitch it to a magazine.

"They told me that they thought I had a book, due to the amount of material that I had collected. I just had hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of interviews and rich written material from Layton himself."

"Some of the feedback that I got after I submitted my first draft of the manuscript was that they wanted to see a bit more of me in the story. That's something that I was really uncomfortable with, just due to the job I have as a journalist. It made sense to establish why I was the person telling it and the origins of my friendship with Layton.

"But otherwise I wanted to be this invisible narrator in the story. In terms of my reporting, it was a bit complicated and messy at times and very different from the way I normally operate as a journalist. But from the beginning, I already had an unusual start to my relationship with Layton, we really became very close friends.

"From the beginning, when Layton was alive, the thing that he told me again and again was, 'Don't hold back on anything. Nothing is off the table.' He was really turned off by the idea that, in many cases, people who are sick and dying are written in a very flat way. We tend to elevate these people to sainthood. But whether they're dying or healthy, people are still complicated and flawed.

"Layton was a complicated and flawed person. I really respected and felt relieved by the fact that that was what he wanted, because that was always my goal as well. A large part of our friendship was based on how we both hated sentimentality. Wedding photography is a realm that's full of this sentimentality. He saw in my writing that I could take on these subjects that had heavy emotions tied to them but weren't treacly.

"His family had spent a lot of time around him. I don't know if they got these feelings from him or they have them independently, but they were very much committed to the same mission. It made my job a lot easier."