Tessa Booth, PHS Class of 2025, Publishes Second Book

Seeing other people struggle, I started wondering if there was a better way to help.”

"After the Last Goodbye," Tessa Booth, Amazon 2025, 100 pages.

Tessa Booth, 18, graduated from Peninsula High School in June 2025 and is enrolled at Oregon State University in Corvallis, pursuing a BioHealth Sciences major. She published her first book, “You Are Not Alone,” a mental health manual for teens, in June 2024. Her second book, “After the Last Goodbye,” is work of fiction that examines many of the same themes.

Wauna resident Tessa Booth, 18, has been busy.

The straight-A student and National Honor Society member graduated from Peninsula High School in June, where she was a new transfer two years ago. She has also completed the Girl Scout career she began as a 6-year-old, finishing with its highest honor, the Gold Award, an achievement less than 6% of scouts attain. In the fall, she’ll start studies in the honors program at Oregon State University in Corvallis for a BioHealth Sciences major, with an eye toward medical school.

And she just published her second book, a novella about the emotional challenges of grief and loss. This follows her first book of last year, a nonfiction overview of mental health issues many teens face and how to handle them. Both books come from the work of facing her own struggles. “I have always had a problem connecting with people since I have Asperger’s Syndrome,” Booth told KP News.

Asperger’s was thought to be a discrete condition, but is now considered part of Autism Spectrum Disorder, or neurodivergence, since not all people experience the same effects of autism in the same way. Behaviors may range from differences in sensory perception to processing emotions in ways that are not considered neurotypical.

“Others may make remarks or view autism in a negative light, which can definitely be hurtful,” Booth said. “At the end of the day, unfortunately, we can’t really change what others may think of us, and have to do our best to learn to not let it get us down. It helps to have close friends and family who understand you and accept you for who you are.”

Booth underwent counseling for anxiety and depression at her previous school, Summit Olympus High School in Tacoma. Part of her progress became a desire to help others with the experience she gained from learning good mental health practices. That led to creating a student support group at Summit, with the help of her counselor, and then writing her first book, “You Are Not Alone: An Illustrated Guide to Mental Health.”

The 200-page manual is written to familiarize young adults with common mental health issues and to stress that experiencing any of them is common and not a source of shame. Booth includes tips and resources for confronting issues while stressing that the manual is not a diagnostic tool.

Writing the book “kind of opened my eyes a bit to the experiences of other people,” she said. “It has improved my empathy.” She published it through Amazon. “Funds were used to donate books to public schools in Washington to build a library that provides resources to students struggling. It seemed to be pretty well received.”

The support group she founded at her former school continued with the counselor’s guidance after Booth left two years ago, but came to an end this year when the school closed. That ongoing effort and her book fulfilled her Girl Scout Gold Award requirements.

“My second book, it’s kind of a large change from the first one,” Booth said. “I wanted to try something new. It’s about this girl, her name is Lucy, she loses her best friend to suicide in high school, and the story is about how she navigates her grief, looking back on their relationship.”

It is called “What We Leave Behind,” also published through Amazon, and was inspired in part by her work with the support group.

“Seeing other people struggle, I started wondering if there was a better way to help,” she said. “There are a lot of resources in that (first book), but this is about how people process different things differently, facing challenges such as depression or anxiety for teens especially. I’ve experienced some of the things the protagonist encounters, such as feelings of grief, loneliness, and isolation, (but) all the events and characters are completely fictional.”

And work on her own mental health continues, though it is much improved from earlier years, she said.

“I think it’s something that I’ve always kind of lived with, but it’s much more manageable now,” she said. “How it mostly manifested is kind of making it hard to interact with me. I’m getting better at it, but still some days I kind of struggle with just the basic interaction. I think it’s something that I’ll have to work on throughout my life. Writing has definitely helped me.”

Vicki Biggs contributed to this report.