“Well, we know it wasn’t actually fatal; otherwise, how would we be reading it? But it’s still…” She moved her head in tiny circles, a gesture I had come to know well, as she searched for the words. “We know it was close. And so it raises a million questions.”

“Which is why I could. Not. Put. It. Down,” said Adrien, my other favorite, thrusting the book into the air on each word, her glorious halo of hair—tips dyed a bleached blond—shimmering as she moved. “It sets up the stakes.”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to show how thrilled I was that they’d related to it as I had. We’d been talking about stakes for the past couple of weeks, about the different ways in which literature can demand our attention. “The stakes. Exactly. And then—can someone read the rest of the opening paragraph?” The rest were coming out of their sluggish haze, but slowly. I scanned the class; most of them stared at their desks to avoid catching my eye—I silently begged someone to volunteer, I hated cold-calling, it made me anxious—and then there it was, brilliant Moira’s hand in the air.

As she read, I remembered a conversation with one of the other teachers, an aggressive middle-aged man, who had challenged my choice to teach this particular book when I’d told him at happy hour. “It’s about suicide,” he’d said, looking incredulous. “Aren’t you worried that it’ll be contagious? Do you seriously want blood on your hands?”

“That’s absurd,” I’d told him. “It doesn’t work that way. You can’t induce despair by writing about it! No one ever committed suicide because of a book!”

Still, in the days since that conversation, I’d worried. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied, I probably would have chosen to teach something else. And yet now, seeing the students’ reactions—after Moira finished reading, we began to talk of Styron’s prose, the relentless accretion of black-and-white language, “gloom,” “dread,” “alienation,” and how it so incandescently captured what it was like to be submerged in depression, in “melancholia”—I knew there was nothing at all to what this teacher had said.