When Your Fans Threaten to Kill Themselves

I have been writing online for a few decades. During that time I've had many fans write to me to thank me for writing my books. Sometimes, I get a little rapport going on with them and they become a little more prominent in my mind because they are regular reviewers who post reviews on digital bookstores for me... which I find to be invaluable.

However, lately, over the last few months, I got a new reviewer. I'm going to call him the Gardener for the sake of this article. He wanted to be a writer. He commented on everything I wrote, making comments on my books into the hundreds. All this time, he was pretty charming. I admit I was charmed. I have been a writer for a long time and praise is scant most of the time. The numbers show I'm improving, that more people are reading my books than ever before, and that progress is being made. But numbers don't make me feel a connection to my readers.

Everything was normal until one day, the Gardener told me he was going to finish writing his story and then he was going to kill himself in August.

At first, I tried to be helpful. I told him there are lots of things to live for, and that seemed pretty normal because I usually make a point of replying to fans to thank them for their feedback. He kept insisting that he was going to kill himself in August. Then April. I tried one more thing. I sent him a link to a website for people who are suicidal. He deleted his comment/my comment and kept persisting in this threat on my book's comment thread. This was maddening to me because I did absolutely nothing to provoke his unhappiness. His unhappiness had absolutely nothing to do with me.

And then, I abruptly lost all my patience with him.

I sent him a private message reminding him that I am a stranger in another country and that he needed to get help from someone closer to home. Talking to me about this can only distress me for no reason since I'm too far away to help. I asked him to never mention it to me again.

I felt that this was one hundred percent appropriate since the only contact I had with this person was through my books. I am not a mental health professional, not a relative, not even a real friend. He was my fan and I was not prepared to deal with a fan's mental health crisis. I'm still not.

Then he wrote me back and told me that he shouldn't have mentioned anything about it to me until the day before he killed himself. Like that would teach me some kind of ultimate lesson.

So, I thought about that. Would that teach me a lesson?

No. It wouldn't.

I don't know that much about my fans' lives. If one of my fans dropped off the face of the planet, I'm not sure if I would even notice. I would just think that they found something else to read or something more important to do with their lives. I wouldn't even take it personally. I would just keep on writing my stories and new readers would appear. That is what has always happened. I don't expect to be entertaining to one person eternally.

I thought more and I focussed on people who were closer to me. My brain did a huge math problem where I listed all the people I know who have told me that they want to kill themselves (the list is pretty long), how many of them have actually tried to kill themselves (the list gets smaller), then how many of them have overdosed (much much smaller), and then how many have succeeded (very small number). And I wondered for a moment how many of those people have been able to hold me as a guilty hostage for what they did to themselves.

I feel sad for them, but I don't feel responsible for any of it. Meaning, that not one of those people has had the power to rob me of my joy.

Sometimes, I think people are fooled by the written word. They mistakenly think that if someone writes books that somehow makes them a smart person. It doesn't. I'm not smarter than the next person just because I can write a coherent book in a month. Several in a year. That is a skill I have honed. And being able to shine my silver tongue on a book manuscript does not make me a competent therapist. Or even a person with endless compassion. The truth is that I can't even think about people who are that far out of my sphere of influence.

In the end, I'm going to suck on the end of my pen like it's a cigarette and say, 'Don't kill yourself over it, dude.' Then I'm going to go back to writing my book.