Stay is part a history of suicide and part a passionate plea against it. When two close friends took their lives, Jennifer Hecht, a poet and historian, wrote a blog. It was picked up by the Boston Globe, and the response was overwhelming, perhaps because suicide is so frighteningly common today. The rate has increased by 60 per cent in the last 45 years – just one of the many sobering statistics Hecht quotes.Hecht takes the reader from the ancient world, where suicide was often the honourable thing to do; through the Christian one, where an initially ambivalent attitude gave way to visceral hostility; to the post-Enlightenment world, where suicide has become merely an (extreme) example of individuals making decisions for themselves, free from priestly interference. “Outside th