Alissa Bennett is the author of Dead is Better, a twice yearly zine devoted to tales of woe, depravity, and love. She is also the co-host of The C-Word, a podcast with Lena Dunham. Bennett is currently working on her first novel.
It was just four years before he accidentally dispatched himself from planet Earth with a suicidally reckless cocktail of Valium and vodka that Thomas Kinkade celebrated the release of his Hallmark Channel-esque biopic, Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage.
Porn suicides stir the heart’s obsessive embers. It’s not that the details of these deaths are any more lurid, but the depressingly familiar narrative that runs through many sad endings in pornography speaks to me acutely.
It’s always hard for me to identify exactly what it is about a person that compels me toward them in death, and I suppose my usual conclusion is that examining the tragedies or addictions or heartaches of a stranger makes it easier to understand my own.