Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.

When I read Hemingway, I can't take the gun out of his hand. The gunshot is the period at the end of every hopeful sentence. Antoine de Saint-Exupery is forever plunging into the Mediterranean.  Every time I pick up Sylvia Plath's journals, I want to turn off the gas. I want to dump the rocks out of Virginia Woolf's coat pockets. Appended to every sprawling David Foster Wallace footnote, there is another and it says, with unusual succinctness, Dead at 46. 


Can you escape this awareness? Can you ever read the works of a writer who takes his or her life without the asterisk?