THERE WAS A time in my life when I thought to jump off a bridge. It was a time when I read Albert Camus obsessively, especially The Myth of Sisyphus. I was trying to figure out how to write my first novel, Fell of Dark, its title taken from one of the darker poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I asked myself why read his suicide poems and not the one about spring? It was also around this period that I told myself the mood shifts or else it’ll be the bridge, aged twenty-three.

Completing my master’s, I chose as my research topic the neurobiology of suicide. Recently I went back to this project in an effort to understand what puts someone in such a dark space, what makes them read The Myth of Sisyphus obsessively, what makes them give their self an ultimatum about a bridge.