Joey: Suicide is often associated with mental illness. But in your work it’s presented as a logical act. A fiercely rational act. Did you always think of suicide this way? You mentioned that there’s a need for suicide philosophers. One of the warning signs for suicides is a sudden cheerfulness after a long depression, which can be a sign that they’ve made their decision. Is there a freedom that comes with this view of suicide as tool available to us, even if the decision has not been made?

Helen DeWitt: Well, it’s possible to be mentally ill and rational - Leonard Woolf always said Virginia was extremely rational when she was mad. But I don’t think I have ever thought suicide per se evidence of mental illness.

Any number of philosophers have written about suicide. The one I mentioned in The Last Samurai is Jonathan Glover, a modern Utilitarian who wrote a book called Causing Death and Saving Lives. I can’t quote from memory - it’s been a long time since I’ve read him - but he says something like, if death really looks better than the life you’re leading, try to change the life first before killing yourself. Quit your job, leave your wife, go to another country.

So yes, taking suicide as a serious option might offer freedom. If you’re ready to walk away from your life, it clears the mind: you can ask yourself whether killing the body is the only way. There might be some other way to walk away from your life. You could get on a plane, go somewhere new, start over again. NEW GAME NEW GAME NEW GAME.

Or, of course, there might really be no prospect of something better. Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diary: Father would have been 92 today. 92! People do live to that age. His life would have been the end of mine: no writing, no life, nothing. [I am paraphrasing horribly, relying on a very bad memory.] Sir Leslie Stephen died when she was 21, if I remember correctly. She wrote the entry in her diary when she was 46. If someone of her talent was to have no chance of using it, death at 21 looks better than death at 46. And her life as a daughter in a middle-class Edwardian household is hardly the worst we can imagine.