I read a book review that ended with the reviewer explaining how he was going to kill himself when this review was published. It certainly was a shock! For most of the previous 1,500 words, the reviewer had lambasted the book being reviewed—a typical literary novel of bursting ambition and scarce talent. Strangely, the way the review was going made me want to read the book. But then I got to the part where the reviewer started talking about suicide, first in a general sense, pondering the reasons why a living, breathing being would choose self-annihilation over another day, and then more specifically how they, the reviewer, had pondered the act on more than one occasion, especially while reading a book, and had, in fact, decided on committing the final act once the review of this particular book was published. At first, I thought this was perhaps some kind of metaphor or joke, designed to call back to a larger theme or premise within the book. Obviously not real. But the more the reviewer wrote, the clearer it was that this was a serious prospect, and that somehow, certainly a complete failure of editorial intervention, was allowed to run. I wondered if, at the very moment I was reading the review, the reviewer was canceling himself from this life in one of the six typical ways one commits suicide that he had debated in the review (gunshot, hanging, pills, wrist-cutting, jumping, drowning). It cast a pall on the reading of the review, and certainly on the book being reviewed. I thought about the author of the book. They must’ve been mortified. They had written a book that had made the reviewer of the book finally commit to the most final act one can commit themselves to. But perhaps this was actually a great thing in terms of press for the book? Perhaps there were no better means to promote a book these days than for somebody to kill themselves over it. The writer had written something that had provoked a strong reaction. One could not say the reaction to the book was “indifferent” or “bored.” As we all know, even us non-artists: the worst thing in the world for a piece of art is to be boring. Be very, very good or be very, very bad. But do not, under any circumstances, be boring. Otherwise, you might as well—well, you know.