Hornby novel used to stop suicides - American counsellors find black comedy is a life saver
June 20, 2005
The latest novel by Nick Hornby has been adopted by American suicide helplines as a message of hope to talk young people out of killing themselves.
A Long Way Down, the British author’s fifth novel, is a blackly comic tale of four people who are thinking of killing themselves but nevertheless strive to keep one another alive.
Volunteers at two suicide helplines in Los Angeles are using episodes from the book as part of their counselling programme. Another three Californian hotlines are reviewing the book for future use.
The novel has become a publishing sensation in America in the week since its launch and its unexpected success is helping to give Hornby his big break in the US publishing market. The American arm of Penguin has printed 170,000 hardback editions of the book, which has been selling out in many shops.
His novels About a Boy and High Fidelity have been made into films and his memoir Fever Pitch has been adapted twice. The Hollywood remake of Fever Pitch, which transposes football to baseball and stars Drew Barrymore, was a box office success in the United States earlier this year.
Last Friday night in Pasadena, a wealthy enclave north of Los Angeles, sheriffs were called to calm hundreds of impatient fans queueing to meet the balding British author at Vroman’s, a bookshop. “He is like a rock star around here,” said a shop assistant.
Hornby, 48, who has been crossing America for the past two weeks promoting A
Long Way Down, said that the book tour had been “wild” compared with
previous trips.
Learning that the American equivalents of the Samaritans were using the book to
help to save lives was “the most extraordinary reward” for his struggles in
writing it, he added.
An adviser at one Los Angeles helpline said: “This book is not for everyone and certainly not for someone ready to harm themselves right now. But for young people who may be phoning us after a first wave of depression has hit them, it may help to show them a way out of their problems.” He added: “The message is that they are not alone.”
About 870,000 people kill themselves across the world each year. The fastest-growing groups at risk include first-year college students. Many of America’s 600 suicide helplines admit that they are struggling to find new ways of reaching young people in peril.
A Long Way Down tells the stories of four depressed people who meet on the roof of “Toppers’ House”, the London equivalent of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which is a popular suicide spot. They spend the night expressing their woes and the next morning turn into each other’s life savers.
According to Hornby, the underlying theme is taking comfort from others, however unlikely, irritating and unwelcome they may be.
“I am not sure there is a message but I wanted to get the idea across that even in a crisis we can maybe save ourselves by making a connection,” he said.
“This conviction stems from my own melancholia. Although I have never got close to killing myself I respect it as a choice for others, but it is not for me.”
Hornby has spoken in the past about the emotional toll of raising Danny, his autistic son. He added: “I so respect people working on these suicide hotlines. I have not tried it but I suspect that it’s a very tough role to take on.”
He said that he had not tried to “sugar-coat” his characters but had instead made them sarcastic and awkward so that they felt “real”.
The book’s adoption by helplines has provoked strong reactions among suicide experts. Dr Morton Silverman, senior adviser to the Suicide Prevention Resource Centre, warned that recommending a humorous book such as A Long Way Down to an emotionally fragile person might backfire.
“They might take the wrong lesson from it and jump,”
he said, recommending more direct books such as Darkness Visible, William
Styron’s harrowing account of a battle with suicidal impulses.
Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and
Psychotherapy, said that the book could
be a useful tool.
“Creative therapy is very important — sometimes I talk about the last page of Middlemarch, which has something to recommend it to people who worry that they have achieved nothing in life,” he said.
“For young men today, suicide is the major cause of death — and that is not the case for women. Hornby does understand something of the dilemmas of masculinity, which is a big problem in the world.”
A spokeswoman for the Borders book chain said that apart from J K Rowling, Hornby was the most popular contemporary British author in America.
“People have grown up with Nick Hornby from High Fidelity and are facing the same kind of darker issues that he is writing about now,” she said.
The rights to film A Long Way Down have been bought by Warner Brothers and Johnny Depp, who joked that he would like to play all four characters — but is expected to settle for the role of one called Martin.
Source: Times, 19/06/2005