Today I was starting to teach William Styron’s Darkness Visible. One benefit of teaching high school English was that, unlike teaching elementary school, say, I needed only one lesson plan per day, which I’d do over and over. Of course, in the drama of the weekend, I hadn’t even made a lesson plan, but I knew I could wing it; this book, one of the first open accounts of depression, was one I’d read at least seven times. I had marked up my copy heavily; each page was a landscape of underlines, check marks, exclamation points in the margins. The account was dire and raw, not necessarily approved material for a high school, and definitely not on any of the tests the students would have to take at the end of the year. But to me it was clear that many of them—high achievers, for the most part—were struggling, and that Styron’s plain description of what it was like to be engulfed in this way might help them feel less alone. It had done so for me, at least for the moments I was absorbed in it, even if the feeling didn’t last far beyond when I closed the cover. It wouldn’t fix them; fixing wasn’t a book’s job. But it might be their friend.

“Talk to me about this opening sentence,” I said in first period, after I’d apologized about the papers. I had expected them to be upset, but they were mostly still half asleep. Only a couple of students shifted anxiously in their seats, fiddled with their pens. “‘In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind—a struggle which had engaged me for several months—might have a fatal outcome.’ What is he doing here?”

I looked from student to student; some of their uniforms were wrinkled like pajamas. I remembered wearing that exact uniform, sitting in those very seats, not so long ago. In the classroom, as a student, I could forget about the me that existed everywhere else—the person I was to my parents, the person I was pressed up against the bathroom stall door with a boy’s finger inside me. Once the bell rang and I was sitting facing the teacher, looking no one my age in the eye, I could relax. But only then. Maybe nothing had changed.

After a moment my favorite student—Moira, a skinny girl with a sharp, smart chin who nodded avidly at everything I said—shot up her hand.

“He uses the word ‘fatal,’” she says. “That’s a big deal.”

“Why?” I said.