He’d met a lot of people who loved to announce that they were failures, and then other people, usually friends, felt compelled to deny it, saying, No, no, you’re judging yourself too harshly, using bizarre and ridiculous standards, you have such good things going on, even if you feel in some way that you have fallen short! — but when it came to suicide, if you were still here then you could absolutely be considered a flop.

I want to begin with what this is not. A definition by negation. Two exes have accused me of doing this trick all the time. It feels relevant to mention only because, as with most things in a guy’s life, this is all about women. Writing anything about the woes of young men in contemporary fiction can feel like yammering about a lost cause. It can also prompt some pretty fatuous counters. Not even Joyce Carol Oates could be spared — when she shot out a tweet in 2022 about how a literary agent had told her he couldn’t even get editors to look at debuts by ambitious boys, the Twitterati collectively told her to get stuffed.