Page 129 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

and now they say I’m an addict.
Now they ask why.
Why!

Don’t they know
that I promised to die!
I’m keeping in practice.
I’m merely staying in shape.
The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I’m on a diet from death.
Plath’s death, however, made Sexton rethink her options. “I’m so fascinated with Sylvia [Plath]’s
death: the idea of dying perfect,” she told her therapist. She felt Plath had chosen an even better
“woman’s way.” She had gone out as “a Sleeping Beauty,” immaculate even in death. Sexton
needed suicide to be painless and leave her unmarked. And by 1974, she had become convinced that
dying from car-exhaust fumes fit that set of criteria. It would be her town gas. She thought about it,
spoke about it with friends.
So that’s how Sexton took her life, after taking off her rings and putting on her mother’s fur coat.
She went to her garage, closed the door, sat in the front seat of her red 1967 Mercury Cougar, and
turned on the engine. The difference between her original choice of sleeping pills and carbon-
monoxide poisoning, of course, is that whereas the former are rarely lethal, carbon monoxide
invariably is. She was dead within fifteen minutes.
But here Sexton’s story converges with Plath’s once again. Beginning in 1975—the year after her
suicide—automobiles sold in the United States were required to have catalytic converters installed
on their exhaust systems. A catalytic converter is a secondary combustion chamber that burns off
carbon monoxide and other impurities before they leave the exhaust pipe. The fumes from Sexton’s
1967 Cougar would have been thick with carbon monoxide. That’s why she could sit in a closed
garage with the engine running and be dead within fifteen minutes. The exhaust from the 1975
version of that car would have had half as much carbon monoxide—if that. Today’s cars emit so
little carbon monoxide that the gas barely registers in automobile exhaust. It is much more difficult
to commit suicide today by turning on your car and closing the door of the garage.
Like her friend Sylvia Plath, Sexton was unlucky. She had an impulse coupled with a lethal
method, just a year before that method stopped being so lethal. Had her difficult 1974 been instead
her difficult 1984, she too might have lived much longer.

We overhear those two brilliant young poets in the bar at the Ritz, eagerly exchanging stories
about their first suicide attempts, and we say that these two do not have long to live. Coupling
teaches us the opposite. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s
world.

1 “A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously, to the demands of his vocation,” Stephen Spender, himself an
accomplished poet, once wrote, “and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have
said is near to madness.”
2 “When she killed herself at age thirty,” Ernest Shulman wrote, “Sylvia fit several categories for which suicide odds are
increased. Although former suicide attempters constitute about 5 percent of the population, a third of completed suicides have
previously attempted suicide; this includes Sylvia. Ex–mental patients comprise a significant proportion of suicides; this also
includes Sylvia. Divorcees have a suicide rate several times higher than that of married women; Sylvia was getting a divorce.
Foreigners everywhere have elevated suicide rates; Sylvia was living in England, far from familiar places and people. Suicides
tend to be isolated people under severe stress; this was true of Sylvia. Broken homes produce a disproportionate number of
suicides; Sylvia came from a broken home.” He goes on: “She could never again be intertwined with a man from whose alleged
greatness she could feed her own dreams of glory.” Not to mention Plath’s earlier, aborted grieving for her father, who died
when she was eight. “If a child’s development is impeded because of incomplete mourning of a loss, that child will be
handicapped in acquiring the mutuality necessary for building an integrated identity and maintaining strong emotional ties,”
Shulman continues. “Sylvia’s narcissism was ultimately her undoing.”
3 I haven’t even mentioned the biggest example of how our inability to understand suicide costs lives: roughly 40,000
Americans commit suicide every year, half of whom do so by shooting themselves. Handguns are the suicide method of choice