Writers who committed suicide

3 June 2010

Here's a nice little post to cheer you all up. If you're a writer, you stand a good chance of ending your life cut up on a pair of rails, dangling on a rope, by medicine and/or drug poisoning, or drowned in your bath and/or blood. And all this by your own doing.

Mind you, you only get second chances if you mess up grossly at your first try.

Writers like R.H. Barlow, John Berryman, Bozhidar, Menno ter Braak, Thomas Chatterton, Elise Cowen, Thomas Disch, Daniel Evans, John Gould Fletcher, William Lindsay Gresham, Ernest Hemingway, D.A. Levy, Klaus Mann, John O'Brien, Piet Paaltjens, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton all commmitted suicide.

In fact, there are many, many more, but I just didn't feel like typing all those names down. As writers we always have to watch out that we don't develop RSI.

May I politely suggest you don't follow these writers' example? Suicide is not a very pretty way to leave, and people won't really like you for it. I just thought you should know.