I've decided to end my life. I know this will come as a shock to some of you and I'm sorry if it upsets anyone. Sorry, also, if a text message is a strange way to find out.
A 2020 novel written by British comedian and novelist Mark Watson.
The novel begins with James Chiltern, a lonely, overweight and depressed man reeling from a recent string of bad fortune, boarding an overnight train from London to Edinburgh and sending a text to all 158 of his phone contacts informing them that he intends to end his own life. He then switches his phone to airplane mode, ensuring that no one can get in touch with him. As the train makes its way from London to the bridge in Edinburgh that James intends to throw himself from, the narrative switches between his musings and the perspective of several recipients of the message — his flatmate Steffi, his ex-girlfriend Michaela, his estranged sister Sal, his mother Jean and his former best friend Karl — find themselves coming together to try and rescue James from himself, while grappling with the ways in which their own actions may have led James to his current state of mind.
- Ambiguous Disorder: Sal's assistant Meghan describes herself as "neuroatypical", but we never actually learn in what way. The one time she seems to open up about it, Sal is distracted by her own thoughts and misses it.
- An Aesop: About communication and caring for others. Pushing people away only hurts everyone in the long run.
- Appearance Angst: James is overweight, sweats easily, struggles with compulsive / stress eating and is consequently riddled with body image issues, which have contributed significantly to his unhappiness. It is suggested that he might not be as overweight as he believes (others, while acknowledging his weight, tend to discuss him in less "large" terms as he discusses himself, implying that his neuroses on the subject have distorted his impression of himself or just that it's not that big an issue for them as it is for him).
- Babies Make Everything Better: Played with. Michaela realises that she might be pregnant at the end of the story. However, while she and Philip manage to patch things up over their argument it is still hinted that they aren't particularly well-suited for each other, and that having a baby together might not help. Notably, despite realising that the moral of events is to communicate better with others, Michaela decides to keep her suspicions to herself for the present.
- Bittersweet Ending: James doesn't kill himself but Gina, the conductor on the train who he befriended, does. James also hasn't been magically cured of his depression, but his loved ones are at least reaching out to him at last, hopefully providing him with a support network which can help him in future.
- Butt-Monkey: Played for drama. James has been suffering a run of bad luck within the last few years — his father has died, his sister has cut ties with him, his girlfriend has left him causing their shared business to fail, his best friend fired him from the replacement job he was given, and so forth — all of which has contributed to his suicidal depression.
- Control Freak: Sal, a business efficiency expert who has gained some fame through books and articles preaching effective time management, and who tries with increasing difficulty to apply her own ideas to James's situation. The novel suggests that it all stems from a deep-seated fear of death which she is constantly trying to distract herself from, which makes the fact that her current stress involves her brother threatening to kill himself particularly hard to cope with.
- Despair Event Horizon: Played with; James makes the final decision to kill himself after a disastrous blind date in which the woman thoughtlessly stands him up and posts photos on social media of her dating another, more conventionally attractive man. However, the novel makes it clear that it's too glib to blame his actions on this one event, and that the feelings and depression which led to his decision had been building for a while.
- Disappeared Dad: Alan, James's father, passed away a few years before the story starts. As James was very close to him, his absence has deprived him of a significant pillar of support that he could have drawn on.
- Driven to Suicide: James has reached this point before the novel starts, and the story involves him making the trip to the location where he intends to do it, having sent out his suicide note to his phone contacts. It also flashes back to show how James reached
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Downplayed, as Karl is not exactly a "bad guy" in the common sense of the trope. However, he does have a rather sketchy and loose sense of ethics (for one, he's quite happy mining the data of the clients for the ridesharing app he's built with the intent of selling it for profit), and his "betrayal" of James is probably the one that cuts the deepest. But it's frequently mentioned that he deeply loves his mother and that most of what he's done has been with the intent of giving her a comfortable life.
- Heel Realization:
- After Sal explodes at her assistant during a panic attack about James, the almost pathetically grateful way that her assistant reacts to Sal's attempts at trying to apologise and make her feel better suddenly strikes her as similar to the tone Jean used after Sal tried to comfort her during one of their phone calls. This makes Sal realise just how cold and remote she can be when dealing with people, even those she's supposed to be closest to.
- After having an argument with Philip during which he accuses her of cut-and-running from situations once she loses interest or they get too difficult, Michaela realises that his accusations have merit, and that she should have tried harder in her relationship with James (or at least found a less selfish and cruel way of ending it with him).
- Philip himself eventually acknowledges that he's been a self-centered, jealous and unhelpful prick throughout the course of events as well.
- Not quite a realization, but having brushed it off up to this point Karl is forced to actually confront his guilt over throwing James under the bus by firing him over a damaging leak concerning a high-profile customer's private life that was actually caused by Karl himself.
- Irony: Steffie, the person who knows James the least out of all the main "contacts", is the one who is the most proactive in trying to find and help him. And on the flip side Jean, his mother and in theory the one who should be closest to him, is the one who is furthest out of the loop.
- Jerkass: Philip, Michaela's new boyfriend, a rather image-conscious gallery owner who spends most the novel reacting with passive-aggressive ironic sarcasm and barely veiled jealousy regarding Michaela's obvious distress over James's text. He does come to acknowledge what a jerk he's been towards the end, however, and tries to help out.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- Sal is not entirely wrong to be a bit hurt and angry that James missed her wedding. But she refuses to listen to his explanations or consider his better nature up to this point, and lets her anger turn into bitterness and resentment. While her anger might be justified, she realises that the rift she let grow between them was not.
- Philip is dismissive of James's suicide note and tends to act passive-aggressive and ironic / sarcastic about Michaela's concern. However, when this all eventually blows up into an argument, he's not entirely wrong to accuse Michaela of being one of those people who latches on to a new interest / person for a while only to eventually cut and run when she gets bored or when things start to get too serious or difficult for her. His initial reaction — that James is merely pulling a cruel attempt at manipulating people's emotions for attention — is cynical, but it's also because he doesn't actually know James.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Inverted; James is a legitimately nice and helpful man who has nevertheless experienced a significant run of devastating bad luck, all of which has dented his confidence in himself and the world. At one point he bitterly notes how unfair it is that the world has reduced him to the state that he's in and how everyone he cares about has seemingly tossed him aside despite the fact that he's only ever tried to help other people, and that now he's decided to end it all he at least doesn't have to care about other people. However, he still can't stop himself from reaching out to Gina, the train conductor, who appears to be struggling with her own issues. Though sadly it's not enough to prevent Gina from ending her own life.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Each of the main "contacts" has played some role in James's isolation and consequent suicidal depression, of which they are moved to guiltily reflect on over the course of the story:
- Jean seems to have focussed more on bonding with Sal rather than James during their upbringing, leaving a distance between them which means that he doesn't appear to have considered himself able to turn to her for support. She realises that she doesn't actually know as much as she should about what's going on with him and didn't make as much of an effort as she should have to find out.
- Sal let her anger towards James over his accidentally missing her wedding curdle into bitterness and resentment, leading her to snub his efforts to try and apologise and mend bridges; their "estrangement" is entirely of her doing.
- Michaela was a key factor in James's estrangement from Sal since she encouraged him to attend a trade event which led to them missing their train and consequently Sal's wedding, causing Sal's grudge, and after their first main argument never really attempted to patch things up before eventually ending the relationship and moving to Germany. She also cheated on James with Philip, giving her an excuse to break up with him.
- Karl fired James from their ride-sharing business after the infidelities and embarrassing chats of a wealthy and powerful client who James was responsible for driving were exposed. And to make matters worse, Karl himself was actually the one who exposed them, but fired James to cravenly save his own skin.
- Even Steffie, who has less responsibility in the matter than the others, finds herself coping with this, as she realises that she could have made more of an effort to get to know James and find out what was going on with him rather than keeping her distance; when he eventually broke down in front of her one night, her awkward response meant that he just felt embarrassed about it rather than able to turn to her. She also guiltily realises that she's been treating the online hunt for him as a kind of amateur detective project when it is in fact about stopping a desperately unhappy man from ending his own life, and that there will be tragic consequences if she fails to find him in time.
- Nice Guy: James is a legitimately kind-hearted and friendly man who values and gets great satisfaction from helping others, and the fact that the world has trodden on him despite this is a significant part of what's fueling his unhappiness. But it also means that when Steffie goes online to seek help in finding him, people whose lives James has touched for the better or who simply realise what a decent man he is will be moved by his plight to try and help him.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Played with to the point of subversion. Receiving a suicide note from someone could, of course, normally be considered an "out-of-character" event, but what alarms so many people is the way James has written it, which is very much in character for him. He's not the sort of person to threaten such a drastic thing just to get attention, and his suicide note is accordingly modest, apologetic and self-effacing — which means he's very serious about it.
- Parental Favoritism: Downplayed; Jean loves her son but has always found it harder to communicate and bond with him when compared to Sally, and so tended to focus on Sally and leave James to her husband. When her husband passed away, however, she never really reached out to replace him in James's life, denying him crucial support. It's implied that Jean suffered from postpartum depression following James's birth, which may have partially caused this.
- Technophobia: Jean is resistant to modern technology, to the extent that she doesn't own a mobile phone and has unreliable internet access. This both has created a gulf between herself and James, who is very much into computers, and means that she's ultimately the one most out of the loop with the situation regarding James, a circumstance that she naturally can't help but dwell on.
- Toilet Seat Divorce: Deconstructed. Barely a month after their first serious fight following missing Sal's wedding due to a promotional event Michaela insisted that they attend, Michaela cheated on James and broke up with him. At the time, James protested that a single fight, even a nasty one, is hardly a reason to break up what up to that point seemed like a pretty stable and successful relationship. Years later, during the events of the novel, Michaela guiltily acknowledges his point, and all but confirms that it was actually because Michaela couldn't handle the relationship becoming serious and so latched onto the first excuse she could find to break it off without considering how it might affect James.
- You Are Not Alone: James, not without reason, feels discarded by the people he cares for and has convinced himself that they'd be better off if he wasn't around anymore. The premise of the novel is his contacts coming together to find and help him, and thus prove this isn't the case. Gina, the woman on the train, finally manages to talk him down by showing him the texts and Facebook groups that have been formed to try and find or reach him, proving that despite what he tells himself there are people who care about him. Unfortunately, Gina is in a similar position to James and no one has done the same thing for her...
- Also deconstructed at one point. James accidentally turns his phone on and, while he doesn't read the messages, is confronted with a huge amount of missed calls and texts from people who've tried to reach out to him. Unfortunately, he's so deep within his Despair Event Horizon that he doesn't take it as a sign that people love him and want him to be okay, but just as them reacting out of guilt or an attempt to ease their consciences, bitterly reasoning to himself that if they truly cared for him they wouldn't have abandoned him and let him get to the point where he was feeling so alone and hopeless in the first place.
