Suicide isn’t always impulsive
It’s a common misconception that most suicides are an impulsive act — and something I thought was true as well. Although we can’t speak to those who have killed themselves, we can still ask those who survived about their ordeal.
And many admit to planning out their suicide for months, maybe even years, before taking any action.
If you remove the impulsiveness from suicide, then it becomes a measured act. From a writing perspective, this slows everything down: the suicide is all the time leading up to the act — and for those that survive it is all the time after it too.
Suicide, time and the novel
Time is an important tool in a novel. In thrillers, for example, there’s often a race against time to rescue someone; in a romance, there might be just five days until the prom to ask someone out. The way we tell stories distorts time, and I wanted to explore how a suicide can both speed up and slow down time.
Part of the “planning” of a suicide includes whether or not to leave a note. Only 1-in-5 people who take their own lives leave any kind of message saying sorry or explaining why. Again, speaking to those who survive, for many it’s because they don’t know how to say what they want to say or they don’t want their words to be misinterpreted.
In The Victoria Lie, this is the case for Zoe too:
“It wouldn’t have mattered what I wrote in a note, it wouldn’t have been enough. It could be the simplest language and it would be overanalysed, each sentence disassembled. Goodbye is a really simple thing to say face-to- face, but impossible in a note.”
She wants to explain to boyfriend James and best friend Alison her wish to die is nothing to do with them and to ask them to move on with their lives. She wants to do this face-to-face, but without this giving them the means to stop her. So she takes a Paracetamol overdose.
Taking time, saying goodbye
When I was researching overdosing on the Internet, I discovered that Paracetamol kills you by destroying your liver. It’s a slow, painful death that can take up to 10 days. A Paracetamol overdose can be treated within the first few hours, but if the treatment is given too late and fails, the only option is a liver transplant — an option rarely available to those who’ve taken a purposeful overdose.
This slow death gives Zoe an opportunity to talk to James and Alison from her hospital bed — after she’s taken the overdose.
“I knew a Paracetamol overdose would give me a window of a few days, before I died, to talk to you about it, to explain. I didn’t want to leave you wondering why, wondering if there was anything you could have done. I knew this way you’d have the chance to ask, so you wouldn’t be left with any niggling questions. I wanted to make sure you could move on.”
I wanted to make sure Zoe’s story was feasible, so I researched further — and found two real life cases of people taking Paracetamol and because they wanted to use the post-overdose period of time to say goodbye.
When someone is dying every second important: but if they’re dying slowly then the days yawn ahead of their death. Both James and Alison struggle to come to terms with what’s going on: they find it difficult to be around Zoe but know if they don’t spend time with her they’ll regret it once she’s gone.
When you have a few days left, you have no time at all and all the time in the world.
