Suicide, perhaps the most complex of all human acts, has always intrigued people and particularly writers who, in their attempt to understand the philosophical implications of such a tendency or an act, are often accused of aestheticizing it. Of course, the fact of suicide, epidemiologically speaking, is of serious sociological importance when we consider the rise in global suicide rates, particularly since the year 1998, which has been termed, with deliberate jocular fancy I suppose, the year of the 'Suicide Boom'. But then, we have those recurrent instances where the artist's committing suicide imparted new, yet often forceful, levels of meaning, creating considerable biographical interest when subjecting her work to literary and theoretical analysis. In what can be termed 'reverse mimesis' life imitates art, even pursues its intrinsic death-logic to a culmination in voluntary death. I'm specifically thinking of writer such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yukio Mishima and to a certain extent Ernest Hemingway, only to name a few. While studying their work, with the theme of suicide in mind, one is confronted with the contingency that makes formulating definitions impossible. The dominant, primal question is: 'What or who is a suicide?"
I would be very glad if you shared your views about suicide, its implications in the arts, its importance in cultures and societies. Also, I would be extremely thankful if you refer to, in the passing, instances of suicides in fictional and non-fictional works that you might have read. I myself have managed to read quite a number of books on this matter but of course, I discovered that it's not humanly possible to know everything that has been read or said on suicide. You could allude to the obvious ones such as the suicide of Goethe's Werther. You could also refer to yourself.