Mireille Juchau

And she uses, you know, she quotes from him as well as a broad range of philosophers and historians.

And I mean, interesting, I interviewed her at Glee Books recently.

And beforehand, we were talking about how to describe what she'd done.

And

She said she doesn't see them as essays.

She sees it as a standalone work of five chapters.

And she didn't really have a word for what it is that she's doing.

And I think that's quite interesting because I think she's doing something new with the way that she's put this, she's blended reportage, personal stories, using fictional techniques, as you mentioned.

And quite a lot of testimony and witnessing goes into this book in a similar way to, say, the way that Cusk is a listener.

We have great tracks of other people's stories in here.

I think what's interesting about her style is she does all that sort of background legwork of reportage and then she brings it all to bear on a kind of really profound meditation on what these questions mean.

So if I could skip to one of the other pieces that I talked about with her about youth suicide, she starts off giving us examples of suicide.

interviews she's done or her relationship she forms with the sister of a young person who's committed suicide.

And it's a very personal story.

It's a very intimate story and it takes place over several years.

And in that piece, she also interviews teachers at schools that have had to deal with the aftermath of suicide.

And what she does is she sort of presents all this factual material as well as kind of excerpts from the young woman who killed herself's diary, conversations she had with her sister and her teachers.

And then she brings that all into a kind of meditation on the question of

what responsibility does a school have to remember people who have been lost during their time at that school?

And she talks about the different ways that schools have handled this issue from early days where they just buried it under the carpet and they didn't want to speak about it for fear of contagion to now where there's a sort of mental health model that is followed very meticulously in terms of counselling students.