In “My Suicides” by Debbie Urbanski, the narrator meets a manifestation of each suicide that enters her life at different times. They appear as comforting figures, promising that they have her best interests at heart and constantly encouraging her to walk in the direction they want while also filling her head with arguments against those who would rather she stayed. Over the years, she fights a lonely internal battle, pulled back and forth between these unsettling but familiar and warm promises of her suicides, and the less predictable, less familiar world she is trying to understand and love. “My Suicides” is an exquisite piece of writing that explores the dark, messy depths of the human heart with bold and fearless honesty, blending a difficult subject with touches of dark humor and moments of wonder. It’s a beautifully uncomfortable read.
Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World (Simon & Schuster 2023) and the story collection Portalmania (Simon & Schuster 2025). Her stories and essays have been published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Granta, and Conjunctions, among other places. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a CNY Book Award, and an ASLE book award for environmental creative writing. She lives with her family in Central New York.
Marissa van Uden: Thank you so much for joining us today, Debbie! I so admire this story, and how you were able to write about suicide in a way that doesn’t come across as moralistic or didactic, which is an easy trap that many writers might have fallen into. Instead, this piece feels raw and honest, and so humane because of that. I thought you pulled off this difficult concept so well. How did the idea for this story take shape, and did you ever struggle with doubts about taking on such a challenge?
Debbie Urbanski: It will likely be impossible for me to talk about this story without talking about my own mental health so let me lead with that. I’ve struggled with depression and suicidal ideation off and on throughout my life, but there was a period of years where things became particularly difficult. In retrospect, I definitely should have gone on medication earlier—it would have saved me a lot of suffering—but I was hesitant at the time and worried it would affect my writing, so instead I wrote a lot. Particularly I would free-write in a sort of journal form when I was in my lowest spots. After I found more stability, thanks to (finally!) ongoing meds, therapy, and a year-long Dialectical Behavioral Therapy program, I went back to those notes and decided I was ready to try and make something from them. Partly I thought the writing was interesting in a raw way. But I also wondered if it might be worthwhile on a personal level to create something out of some very hard years. My goal was to try and capture how it felt to be frozen in this limbo state between staying alive and not staying alive, when I was hyper-aware every minute that living was a choice I needed to make. All this stuff is not easy to talk (or write) publicly about—but I felt like it could be worth the discomfort, both for myself and in terms of normalizing mental illness.
MVU: It’s courageous undertaking. Did the story go through many iterations to get it right? What were some of the biggest moments where you could see the way forward or knew you had to change or rewrite part of it, if any?
DU: My writing process always tends to be chaotic and messy, but this story was particularly so. That journal I kept ended up being around 20,000 words, and, for a long time, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with all of it. Often the biggest challenge for me is figuring out the form and angle of a story. I played around with telling the narrative through dictionary entries—or even making it more of an essay. What made things click, I think, is when I built a list of a person’s sadnesses and suicidal thoughts, thinking of how different, for instance, my early encounters with depression were compared with my most recent experiences. (I was also doing some parts work with my therapist at the time, where we literally were personifying the suicidal part of me.) Turning suicide into characters that the narrator could interact with ended up being a useful bridge between my own journal and the final form of this story.
MVU: Many writers might have chosen to write the suicides as terrible creatures, taunting and cruel, flinging mental abuse and breaking someone down. But in this story, they are something much more chilling and terrifying: they’re nurturing, gentle and comforting, almost motherly as they place their hands upon the narrator’s forehead to soothe her, wiping her face softly with their hems and whispering encouragements. They even smell nice. Can you talk about why it was important to show them this way and not as repulsive or villainous?
DU: My own experience with suicidal ideation is that it offered a relief from whatever existential and extreme pain I was feeling. I have a very long list of both actions and words I’m supposed to do or say when my mood dips, but honestly the most effective was always thinking that whatever pain I was in could be over almost immediately. I wanted in this story to show the seduction of suicide, how it felt to me at least—though seduction is probably too negative a word. More the comfort of suicide, how it seemed at the time to be the one thing that cared about me and understood how I was feeling. I also thought this kind of personification would help when I was trying to describe the weird complex loss that occurs when one emerges out of that depressive space and moves away from this suicidal force in one’s life that they were very close to for a long time.
MVU: I thought you got that across so beautifully, and in a way that helps better understand the experience. The narrator obsessively collects suicides from news and media like a bird watcher might track birds. She tells the readers, “This may seem distasteful to you if you do not spend most of your day thinking about suicide,” but to her such collections are necessary and comforting. This is reflected in other areas of her life. “Anchors do not necessarily need to be kind or good, they only need to be familiar.” I loved how you portrayed this need of hers throughout the story. There can be such comfort in the familiarity of darkness and tragedy, or in the gloom of bad weather, when suffering from depression; and, counterintuitively, being around happy, positive people or fine sunny weather can just exacerbate the sense of dislocation and alienation. Could you share a bit more about this, and about the choices made for how to show it on the page?
DU: For me, depression has always had a performative element which I found exhausting. Having to pretend, outside of my home, that I was okay only deepened the sense of isolation that always comes with depression. So, being someone whose default mode is researching, I began researching the stories of people who died by suicide. Even if it was a one-way form of connection, I found comfort that other people had felt the way I’ve felt. So much of trying to claw out of one’s deep depression is being told that what you’re feeling is wrong, that your feelings don’t reflect reality. It’s almost like you’re being told that what’s real to you isn’t real. So reading stories about people who killed themselves felt like confirmation that what I was feeling and experiencing was real, to me at least.
MVU: I read your post-apocalyptic novel After World a couple years ago, and I still think about it often. It blew me away and was uniquely haunting and emotionally impactful. Like “My Suicides,” it’s another bold story that stares unflinchingly into darkness, but this time into the grief and loss caused by climate collapse. It’s told primarily through the POV of an AI tasked with making a final record of our species for the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP), and yet the voice is not clinical or cold: there’s a deep affection for humanity in it, and many of the AI’s observations about us—despite our folly—were so touching. Could you tell us about the genesis and development of this novel, and in particular how you crafted the voice of the AI narrator?
DU: I’ve always enjoyed reading a lot of nonfiction to inform my fiction writing. When I was trying to figure out my first novel, I was reading about climate change, specifically extinction, and I began wondering: why is it a given that humans are more important than any of the millions of other species out there? This question, as well as whether the world would be better off without us in it, became the heart of After World. The AI narrator arrived later when my first agent recommended I add a narrative framework to make the book easier to read. I’ve always enjoyed writing from points of view that are difficult at first for me to understand, so I was excited about the challenge of figuring out how this AI narrator might sound, one who was trained on 21st and 20th century novels and is trying to make sense through primary source documents of a human life. (I also read some great books about AI, particularly Life 2.0 by Max Tegmark, that were helpful.)
DU: This is in Morgan Hill State Forest where part of my novel After World takes place and it's also my favorite place to hike and explore the woods.
MVU: I loved that you placed humans as part of the Earth’s ecosystem alongside all the other species, not above all other lifeforms. The AIs given stewardship of the Earth can see the truth we much prefer to hide: that extracting Earth’s natural resources at great speed and harnessing fossil fuels for the sake of convenience and the illusion of control doesn’t make us better than all the other species; it makes us a liability. The future looks bleak, but resetting our species’ mindset to see ourselves as part of the natural ecosystem—dependent on it rather than above or outside of it—seems like the bare minimum needed to make any kind of widespread, systemic change in our behavior. Is this something you think a lot about? What kind of research did you do for this aspect of the novel?
DU: It is something I’ve thought about for many years (and something I still think about): why we humans assume we must be at the center of every story. I’ve been thinking lately about how limited our ideas of intelligence are—how we define intelligence by what humans might possess instead of, for instance, what an insect might possess—and even how limited our ideas of narrative are, where it seems that the only thing we can be interested in generally are stories about ourselves. I’ve wanted for years to write a story or novel that centers other species, particularly non-charismatic species that we consider to be pests (like starlings or the hemlock woolly adelgid)—trying to question why we value certain life forms over others, and why we think it’s okay to kill the things we don’t value. I actually think this all has some parallels to the divisions in the United States right now, that we value and love only the things that look or act familiar and like ourselves.
In terms of research, I spent a lot of time in the woods south of Syracuse (the same woods that play a large role in my novel). I’ve loved hiking for many years, but when I was younger I thought the best hikes were ones in which you ended up on top of a mountain. The whole point of the hike was to get to a traditionally scenic view and everything leading up to that view was an inconvenience almost. But hiking in Central New York, particularly on the Finger Lakes Trail, which is mostly forest, helped me realize how much complexity is going on in the forest and all around us, particularly when I started identifying plants and taking macro photos of what I saw.
DU: I do most of my writing at a desk in my attic.
MVU: Completely agree with you! I question the same things, because once you start thinking about it, it all seems so absurd. I love art that helps us see beyond the narrow human-centric corner we’ve backed ourselves into. What are your favorite books in the climate genre, fiction and non-fiction? Have you read any standouts that really inspired you or stuck with you?
DU: I really enjoyed Fragile by Alexa Weik von Mossner. It’s a smart book, focusing on how climate change will disrupt our supply chain, specifically the shipment of medication including antibiotics. It’s also a page-turner. The Rampart Trilogy by M.R. Carey, starting with The Book of Koli, is also great as it gives nature a violent agency. I have a soft spot for Dry (written by Jarrod Shusterman and his dad Neal Shusterman) as it’s a climate fiction written for teens and I got to read it with my son. With nonfiction my favorites are The Ends of the World (Peter Brannen), The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert), and I Want a Better Catastrophe (Andrew Boyd).
MVU: Amazing, thank you! I’m looking forward to checking out these recs. Let’s chat writing craft: What does a typical writing day or week look like to you? Do you have a routine or any special habits that get you into writing mode?
DU: Because of the project I’m working on right now, I try to start off my writing time reading a chapter of a book about forests or some academic papers on the hemlock woolly adelgid. Depending on the day, that may be all the time I have. I do think reading is a part of my writing process, though hopefully I would also have a chance to sit down and work on an essay or story. I have all sorts of special rituals I want to get back into, mostly having to do with poetry (for a time I was memorizing poems by Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath, and I can’t think of a better way to start a writing session). I’ve started using Freedom to help me focus—it’s an app that blocks off access to email and news sites when I write.
MVU: That sounds great—I’ll have to look that up. How many drafts do you typically take a short story through before you feel it’s ready to go out? Do you love or hate revising?
DU: It varies. I don’t think a dozen drafts are unusual. I like to read each draft out loud and if I get to the point where I can read the entire thing and there’s nothing I want to change, then I know it’s ready to send out. I find the first draft to be the most exhausting. I have the most fun when I get to open my six favorite dictionaries online and spend a whole lot of time at the sentence level finding the perfect words, which generally happens later in the process.
MVU: Very much relate! There’s so much joy in the craft of tinkering with sentences. Last year, your debut short-story collection, Portalmania, was released by Simon and Schuster, and it received some fantastic praise: it was Longlisted for The Story Prize and listed as a Locus Recommended Reading pick for 2025 and the Best New Horror of 2025 from the New York Public Library. Could you tell our readers about the themes of this collection? What do portals mean to you?
DU: I’ve loved portals since I was a kid and grew up always really, really wanting to find one. But as a writer I was interested more in the people who are left behind, or the people who never find their portals—the people whose stories aren’t usually told in traditional portal fantasies. So that’s the focus of quite a few stories in the collection, though my editor and I also expanded the idea of a portal to mean a crossroads, or the idea of leaving, or the challenge of belonging. I’m thinking a lot in these stories about relationships: marriage, the challenges of parenting kids who are different from you, asexuality, neurodiversity, and the shortcomings of love.
MVU: I love to wrap up our interviews by asking authors for a charity they care deeply about and would like to raise more awareness for. Is there a charity you’d love to shout out at the moment, and where can readers find it?
DU: This is such a lovely question. With climate change we hear most about the “charismatic species”—big mammals like the northern white rhinos or the polar bears who are in trouble. But there are so many other species we need to be concerned about as well. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (www.xerces.org) cares about the species that might be off our radar but are still vitally important for a healthy and diverse ecosystem and world. They focus particularly on pollinators, endangered invertebrates, and reducing pesticides.
DU: I have a somewhat unusual writing process that sometimes involves printing a work-in-progress out, ripping it up, and reordering it, usually on the floor of my attic. This is an early version of "My Suicides."
MVU: Oh wow, I’ve never heard of this group! Absolutely going to check them out.
Thank you so much for joining us to talk about your work! Last question: Do you have any other upcoming releases we should look out for, or are you working on anything exciting at the moment?
DU: I’m going to have two pieces coming out in The Sun magazine in the upcoming months: an essay “You Are Entering Those Years” (about my son heading off to college) and an apocalyptic short story “The Open Marketplace of the End Times.” I also have a flash story appearing in Okay Donkey (www.okaydonkeymag.com) on April 17. My current project is about hemlock woolly adelgids: think Watership Down, but with insects.