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Quigley suicide feature

BooksJuly 11, 2017

Oh great, a novel that risks glamourising youth suicide

Quigley suicide feature

What the hell is Sarah Quigley playing at in her novel about three mentally ill young people on the brink of suicide, wonders Holly Walker.

Last week’s “Break the Silence” series by Olivia Carville in the New Zealand Herald was intended to start a national conversation about youth suicide. Are we not already having that conversation? From my own high school days, some 20 years ago, I remember much handwringing and hyper-vigilance about peers who were at risk of self-harm; we all talked about it then. These days we have 13 Reasons Why, (everyone’s talking about that) and news media are slowly but surely breaking down the legal wall that prevents them reporting in detail about suicide. Yet suicide is still, according to the blurb on the back of Sarah Quigley’s new novel, the “last taboo”, and in The Suicide Club she is the latest to enter the conversation.

Quigley, though a New Zealander, is not writing about suicide in the local context. Since winning the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency in 2000, she has been based in Berlin, and her recent novels have been set squarely in Europe. The Suicide Club opens in an unnamed and indistinct northern English city, and shifts in the second half to a kind of pop-up psychological hospital in an abandoned hotel in rural Bavaria. But it is about youth. The three protagonists, brilliant but damaged, and in serious need of support from the feckless and absent adults in their lives, are all 20 years old and on the brink.

Bright O’Connor has written a runaway bestseller, but, unable to cope with the attention and alienated from his pompous and unpleasant reverend father, all he wants to do is throw himself off a building. He does, in fact, but is saved by landing miraculously on the newspaper cart of Gibby Lux. Gibby is a genius inventor who lives at home with his lightbulb salesman father and alcoholic mother. Gibby’s best friend is Lace McDonald – beautiful, unreachable – who draws people to her but has sealed herself off to all but Gibby in an attempt to escape her past. The three send themselves, or are sent by well-meaning relatives, to “The Palace”, part specialist mental health facility, part spa resort, that moves around every year to ensure anonymity for its richer and more famous clients. There they find, largely in each other, some measure of respite, although one continues to decline while the other two largely recover.

The writing itself is lyrical, stylised, self-referential. We know, and can’t forget, that we are reading a novel, because every so often the narrator will remind us: “Does it strike you as odd, the rises and falls that have occurred in just a few pages? Soaring from rooftops and penthouses, speeding up lift shafts and stairwells; descents external and internal, leaves dropping, clothes slipping, heightened hopes, mounting expectations, lowering of standards, plummeting stomachs, sinking hearts. Life isn’t about trudging forwards; more often than not it’s a series of lurches.” Some reviewers have enjoyed this sort of thing.

And let’s talk about those names for a second: Bright, Gibby, and Lace. I’m not sure what’s achieved by giving these characters such pretentious names, other than to alienate the reader. These aren’t everyday young adults battling the all too common demons of depression, anxiety and social isolation. These three are special.

I guess that’s my gripe with the whole book. Wherever you are in the world, mental illness is pervasive among this age-group, as is self-harm and suicide. It’s terrible in its very ordinariness. Many young people know someone who has taken their own life, often someone very close to them. It’s not the sole preserve of the intellectual, physically or emotionally gifted few. You don’t have to be special to feel like you don’t fit in, that there is no hope for the future, and that ending it all might be the ultimate escape. With this characterisation, those names, the hyper-stylised language, Quigley builds walls between the reader and the gritty, real horror of despair. In this novel, suicide is romantic, almost heroic. I’ve debated hard whether to say I think Quigley glamourises suicide, as I’m sure this is not what she intended, but I think she does.

Here’s another question – can a Gen Xer like Quigley write convincingly about the inner lives of today’s twentysomethings? I fit into that new micro generation recently identified – born between 1977 and 1983, wedged in between Gen X and the millenials – and I feel distinctly removed from the generation below me. The difference is in our childhoods – I had an analogue childhood, they had a digital one. When I was in intermediate I used to email the one other kid in class who had an email address, because nobody else had the internet. I got my first cellphone in my last year of high school. Facebook wasn’t invented until after I left university, and until I was elected to Parliament in 2014 I didn’t have a smartphone. Quigley herself eschews social media entirely, and only uses Google when she has to for research. Good for her! But can she really write a novel about three 20-year-olds, their social connections or lack of them, their mental health, without mentioning the internet? In Quigley’s universe, kids carry paper notebooks around to write down key phrases or ideas for new inventions; they cart stacks of physical books with them wherever they go; their common reference points are Samuel Beckett and George Eliot; they write longhand; make scrapbooks of memories and ideas; never pick up a phone or a computer. Perhaps this is because our protagonists are special, not like other kids, but a 400 page novel about the mental health of three 20-year-olds that doesn’t mention social media in any form even once? I don’t buy it.

I’m left thinking about the 130 young people under 25 who take their own lives each year in New Zealand; the roughly 600 in the UK. These people aren’t special. They haven’t written bestselling novels, or invented the next big thing, they don’t stop an entire room of people in their tracks when they walk in. Too often they are disenfranchised, under-employed, unsupported, addicted, lonely, lost. Their deaths are, tragically, as ordinary as their lives. For them, despite all the talk, despite this novel’s entry into the conversation, the silence remains.


The Suicide Club by Sarah Quigley (Penguin, $38) is available from Unity Books.

You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)
You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)

BooksJuly 10, 2017

Deadline for NZ’s coolest writing residency award extended to midnight

You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)
You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)

New Zealand writers – published and unpublished, sane and unsane – have until midnight to apply  for the writers residency at the Surrey Hotel in Auckland.

The deadline to apply for New Zealand literature’s coolest writing residency has been extended but not by much: writers have until midnight (Monday night, July 10) to send in their applications to the 2017 Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency In Association With The Spinoff Award.

“Hurry,” said judges, who received 42 applications as of Saturday morning.

Grey Lynn’s Surrey Hotel – named the Best Hotel in Auckland by a well-known writer in the New Zealand Herald – will host a winner and two runners-up in the second annual residency award.

The winner receives week’s free accommodation at the Surrey along with free breakfast and free wifi. They will also pocket a cool $500 from The Spinoff. There is also be a second and third prize with less nights and less money but the same thrill.

The Surrey Hotel: built in the Tudor ages (1989)

Winners will be announced on July 21; they have until the end of September to take up their residency at the Surrey.

Judges are looking for book projects but will settle for less. Last year’s winners included two writers who used their time to write 25,000 and 23,000 words respectively of their book projects. Runner-up Ashleigh Young wrote a poem.

Note writing desk (left)

Last year’s grand winner was journalist Kelly Dennett. She worked like a demon in her residency and broke the back of her first book, a true-crime story about the murder of Jane Furlong. It has been accepted by Awa Press and will be published later this year.

The runners-up were young adult fiction writer Antony Millen, of Taumaranui, and Wellington poet and essayist Ashleigh Young. Each wrote a report of their experience, which is pretty much the only condition of the award.

The idea for the award came from Spinoff Review of Books editor Steve Braunias after he chose to stay at the Surrey in 2015 to write a crucial section of his best-selling book, The Scene of the Crime.

“It was such a great place to write,” he said. “It’s warm, and dark, and quiet, with thick carpets and dark wood. There are no distractions, it’s clean as a whistle, and the only concern is to sit down and work.

“I cherished the experience and wanted other writers to have an opportunity, too, to write in splendid comfort.

“The Surrey took that idea and have run with it. They are very generous hosts.”

A room much like the one where Steve Braunias wrote a lot about Mark Lundy

The Surrey Hotel is an independently owned hotel complex in the Tudor style, with standard and deluxe rooms, swimming pool, conference facilities, restaurant, bar, and a cat called GM, a stray which now enjoys the good life.

It occupies land on both sides of Great North Rd near the Grey Lynn shops.

The winner can take up their room on a Sunday, and have a free roast dinner on arrival. Breakfast is also gratis during their stay, and there are two free dinners, and complementary wifi. Before they check out the following Sunday, they can sit down and have a farewell free roast.

You may be visited by this cat or a different cat (Image: Ashleigh Young)

Winners will need to negotiate dates with Surrey management, who are incredibly nice.

“We applaud the Surrey for their continued generosity and are happy to award $500 to shower upon the successful applicant,” said Spinoff publisher Duncan Greive.

“The Spinoff is where good things happen and what more good can there be in the world than pampering a few writers.”

The Spinoff will raid its coffers to provide funding for a single value menu Domino’s pizza every night except on Sundays when there is a roast.

Writers from any discipline are invited to apply for the prestigious second annual Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency In Association With The Spinoff Award.

They should send a very brief outline of their project to: madeleine@thespinoff.co.nz

In case they didn’t see the headline, applications close at midnight.


The Spinoff Review of Books is brought to you by Unity Books.