Night Falls Fast

"This is really more like a textbook, but it says some important things. She tried to commit suicide herself when she was 28. She is very big on scientific research, and talks about lithium, for example. Styron talks about this too, he says that the use of lithium to stabilize mood swings in manic depression is a great medical achievement – but that he was already too far gone for that. He had to be put on some tranquilizers that made him sick as a dog. Jamison talks about understanding suicide as a response to an unendurable level of mental pain. Frankly that’s what all these books have in common. I don’t want to say that once you’ve seen one suicide you’ve seen them all. But all those who tried to commit suicide, they do it because it seems to be the only reasonable – irrational as it might be – solution to get rid of the terrible mental anguish. So when people leave suicide notes, they tend to say things like ‘I couldn’t bear the pain any longer.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Actually Jamison says very few people leave suicide notes, only about one in four. Jim left no note. Apparently that is very typical, often there is no note. Because he was so dependable and so responsible. He was so responsible that hours before he died he took the sick cat to the vet. That was the last check that he ever wrote. Who would think of taking a cat with a droopy eye to the vet?. He was always extremely thoughtful, very protective. So I couldn’t imagine that he had just left without at least telling me that he had some horrible illness. “Jamison says very few people leave suicide notes, only about one in four. Jim left no note.” I had hoped to find something that would tell me why he had done it. Of course it might not necessarily have helped. He might have said something in there, referred to some problem that I had been aware of while he was alive, but had done nothing about. As I say in my book, maybe it’s just as well there was no note. His words might have made me even more upset than my own thoughts were already making me. I don’t know, I guess you try to justify everything. Believe me I looked everywhere for it. Who knows? Perhaps if you start writing a note it’s already too distracting, you’ve put half a leg back in the land of the living and that might potentially stop you from going about your suicide plans. I don’t know. Often the notes will say, to the ones who are left behind, ‘I love you, this has nothing to do with you.’ But I happen to personally know a husband and wife in Amsterdam whose oldest son, a doctor, killed himself, and he left a note blaming his parents, which is a terrible thing to have done because it was his choice and his decision. I think as Sylvia Plath once said, once you decide to commit suicide, you become extremely clever at figuring out and disguising what you mean to do. Yes, Jim must have been planning this – how did I know? And maybe in the last few days when he was in Holland before he went back to New York, he did act very weirdly. Yes, it was weird, I had never seen him like that. I had no idea what to do with it. But I knew that it scared me. I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even him, because it was so terrifying to me. You know the other thing is that as an immigrant, I was totally in awe of his education. We met on a blind date and I had been told by the girl who introduced us that he had been to an Ivy League school. I pictured some ivy on a wall and that’s all it meant to me. Yale meant nothing to me; I’d never heard of Harvard either. He talked about the history of Boston, and mentioned Paul Revere, to me it was just a brand of pan. I had no idea. And he must have liked that at some level. I think he was charmed by it. Irrelevant, yes, and it made him laugh. But I think somewhere he also liked the idea of this jeune fille who needed to be educated. He always told me I was as smart as he was but that I hadn’t had the schooling. It may have given him a real boost to educate me. And in retrospect I think that had I been rather more forceful,or more persistent, I might perhaps have been able to get him to go for help. I don’t know. But I was almost embarrassed noticing that he was so weird, as though a mentor, a teacher, shouldn’t behave in that way. And what do you do when he does? What he had found so charming for years, my naiveté, probably ended up being something that wasn’t that useful for him. No, I never wrote anything longer than a shopping list. No, he had no idea. I think maybe – who knows – he’s not here to tell me ‘no you’re totally wrong.’ But maybe, since he didn’t have the chance to become a writer because he needed to make money (you’ll notice I don’t equate the two) he said he was going to help me. Maybe together we would have made a beautiful The Upstairs Room . But then he didn’t come through for me. He left me before I had even gotten to finishing the first draft. But I learned a great deal from him, he was a tremendous teacher. I learned more from him than I ever learned in school, which I didn’t get to go to for long."