What I'm thinking about ... teen suicides in fiction

Young adult novels about teenage suicide are on the increase, but is it a taboo too far?
Real distress … should teen novels tackle suicide? Photograph: Ken Ross/Getty

Two teenagers commit suicide; bewildered, their friends desperate try to get their lives back on track. Anger, guilt and sheer overwhelming misery fuel the next long phase of their own adolescences, which are overshadowed by the question: "why?" It is happening all too horribly often. Luckily, this time it is fiction.

In teen novels, as in life, suicide is becoming more common, as a new generation of writers for young adults confronts what has previously been seen as the last taboo.

Some of them turned up at Edinburgh this week. Cat Clarke introduced Undone, about a teenager who kills himself after an explicit video revealing that he is gay is circulated among his friends. In Kite Spirit by Sita Brahmachari, a 'perfect' student commits suicide on the morning of her first GCSE exam. Both draw on real events.

What are we to make of this? Writers for teens have always kept a sharp eye on the preoccupations of the generation for which they are writing: sniffing out the zeitgeist and tapping into the reality is part of what makes fiction for this age group work best.

Sex was cheerfully outed long ago in titles such as Judy Blume's Forever. Drugs followed, with the publication of Melvin Burgess's excellent Junk. Adults were disapproving but teen readers were at ease: there wasn't much in either that they didn't already know, somewhat to the dismay of their parents.

But is suicide the same? While almost all teenagers will experience either sex or drugs or both - they are, after all, pretty universal rites of passage - only a handful will have to go through the harrowing experience of the death of a close friend.

Yet suicide in novels - as in life - is the ultimate expression of the despair from which most teenagers suffer at some time, and exploring the existential angst of the teenage years has always been the stuff of teen fiction. As the suicides mount in real life, so will they in fiction - whether we like it or not.