On a cloudless morning in June 2003, I woke up in my parents' bedroom at their house in London. Benjamin, my boyfriend of three years, was fast asleep beside me. It took a few moments for the horror of the day ahead to gain a foothold on my consciousness. When it did, I felt I could not breathe. I slipped out of bed and went upstairs.
My parents were in South Africa, visiting their grandchildren, and Benjamin and I were house-sitting. For months, I had woken every morning thinking thirstily of death. It was not so much that I wanted to die; more that I didn't want to be alive. I certainly did not want to commit suicide, as my sister Kay had done 15 years earlier. The thought of the pain my death would inflict on my family was unbearable. Our inherited bipolar disorder had already claimed four lives in as many generations.
I was 25. Since my polite expulsion from junior school at 10, for disruptive behaviour, I had reformed. For 15 years I had been diligently reading and learning, getting A grades in exams and a first from Oxford. I'd published a novel at 21, which won a major prize and sold more than a million copies in 20 languages. I had poured effort into my friendships, and tried hard to master my unwieldy moods: to endure the periods of heavy barrenness and focus on those of white exhilaration.
It was difficult to accept that all this effort counted for so little at this critical juncture. In fact, it counted for nothing. Nothing at all.
Four years earlier, in memory of Kay, I had set up a foundation to help disadvantaged South African children attend the nation's best, formerly "whites-only" schools - an event that unleashed in me a heady surge of joy. By January 2003, we were educating 30 incredible kids. But two months later America invaded Iraq; the world's stock markets plummeted; the gold price soared; and the South African rand strengthened by more than a third against sterling. Suddenly the charity's budget had a 35% hole in it and my only hope of filling it was to abandon five years of complex technical experimentation and transform my second novel into the lurid thriller my most commercial publishers hoped for.
The experience was like grinding a very blunt knife deep into my own chest, very slowly. The pain this induced made the depressions that had clouded certain periods of my childhood and adolescence seem almost insignificant. The task of destroying my own work, day after day, in order to help a bunch of other people's children, struck me occasionally as noble, but more often as the height of stupidity. I tried to ignore the fact that, in the event of my death, the royalties from my first novel would be sufficient to honour my commitment to these children.
Only Benjamin and my parents could make things temporarily bearable when I felt like this - which was, increasingly, within minutes of waking every day. As I reached for the phone to call my mother, the flexible strength of its cord stood out like a subtle advertisement. Methodically, but at the same time without concrete intent, I unplugged it and wound it into a coil on my lap.
Writing this five years later, I am profoundly grateful that, having come so close to the point of no return, I did not cross it. That I did not is thanks to my psychiatrist's expert care; to his astuteness in diagnosing bipolar disorder and prescribing the correct mood stabiliser; to the love of my parents and partner, who held my hand and told me I'd get better during the nightmare months that lay ahead of me.
They were right. I did get better, though I also know that the statistical likelihood is that I will probably want to kill myself again before my life's journey is done. To delay that moment as long as possible, I take my pills religiously, get eight hours' sleep every night, don't drink coffee after dinner and interrogate myself carefully before embarking on madcap adventures.
I didn't end up finishing the lurid thriller, but I did write a different book, which is about to be published, and the foundation now supports 51 kids. A stable mood helped me to see the first 30 through high school, and to watch as 29 of them graduated, 20 with honours. The next time I find myself with a telephone cord in my hand, I'll do my best to remember how they looked in their graduation photos.
