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happens is I run into Sam, a friend of a friend who has wanted me forever. I wasn’t really interested and I had a boyfriend. Now I have no boyfriend and I go to parties alone. I tell him I am single. “So you can kiss me.”
    “No, thanks,” he answers. He looks at me and then at the floor. “I don’t want to anymore.”
    Fourth and final, I go to see
Ghost Dog
, the Jim Jarmusch film about an urban samurai, starring Forest Whitaker. Only I would allow Forest Whitaker to take such a pivotalrole in my decision to die. When he wins his Oscar many years later, I say to the screen, “I want the seven grand you made me lose to St. Vincent’s Hospital, you bastard!”
    Do not try to kill yourself without insurance, because if you survive, you will be in so much debt, you will want to die. This becomes a big deal with Dr. R. Because of what I have done, I cannot afford to see him. He drops his fee and keeps it there until the very last year of our sessions.
    Before my suicide note, there is a pre-suicide note, an aperitif if you will. I send my dad a strip of photobooth portraits stuck to a piece of paper that says “Emma loves Daddy.”
    I have no memory of sending it.
    Dad’s response arrives after I’m out of hospital, sent before he knew I was headed there. He photocopies the picture and then turns the photos upside down and draws himself—his beard, his bald head—onto my face, adding: “And Daddy loves Emma.”

CHAPTER 4
    I FIRST THOUGHT OF IT at thirteen. We had a large bathroom with a wall-to-wall mural of peacocks and birds of paradise, jungle birds and tall grass, inspired by Gauguin. I also had a mural in my bedroom: my dad had helped me paint in huge letters on my wall: D.A.I.S.Y., which stood for Da Inner Sound Y’all, the motto of the hip-hop group De La Soul, the first band I loved. They had a skit at the start of their album
3 Feet High and Rising
with a fake game-show host asking a fake game-show audience nonsense questions: “How many feathers are on a Perdue chicken?” “How many fibers are intertwined on a shredded wheat biscuit?” “What does toosh et leh leh pu mean?” “How many times did the Batmobile catch a flat?” “We’ll let the contestants think it over and we’ll return right after these messages!”
    Because of the glorious mural, the bathroom became more of a family hangout than the living room. Many conversations took place whilst Dad was in the bathtub, bubbles and a fancy newspaper holder covering his dignity ashe read the
Independent
. Mum would be at the mirror using what looked like a heated light saber to turn her head of curls from wee ethnic ringlets to chubby glamour rolls. Lisa would be stalking the room, saying “It’s not
fair!
It’s not
fair!”
because, even though she was nine, she functioned primarily as Guardian of Justice. I remember, in the bathroom, at far too late an age, eating a bar of soap in the shape of
The Muppet Show
’s Fozzie Bear, because I loved him and so I wanted to consume him, even if it made me ill. I didn’t yet know the word “foreshadowing.”
    It was in the sacred family meeting place that I one day turned the brass key in the door and climbed up onto a chair to reach the shelf in the wooden cabinet that held Mum’s Valium. Staying balanced on the chair, I tipped out the pills and held them in my hand, weighed them, as if they had wisdom to impart. I couldn’t hear them speak, so I put six of them on my tongue and held them there, waiting for the message. Didn’t swallow, but waited to die, or to half die, for a few minutes. I didn’t die. I spat them out. I put them back in the bottle. Replaced the cap. Gingerly turned the key. And went downstairs for dinner.
    It’s almost always pills with women. It’s a gentle seeping out women seek, like on a classic soul record, when the volume on Otis Redding just slowly gets turned down until he’s gone. What happens after the fade-out? What are the musicians doing now in that