In 1997, a book by Marc Etkind called …Or Not To Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes enjoyed quiet but firm success: quiet, because the buyers themselves often expressed feeling “uncomfortably morbid” about its purchase, even when they left online reviews; firm, because apparently this sort of morbid voyeurism is part and parcel of human nature. Staunch belief in this ubiquitous enjoyment of the gruesome and tragic is presumably why the book’s own editor referred to its content as “pornography”.
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