When is suicide in fiction not the way to go?

I have almost finished reading a book now. The book is a new publication by one of the Finnish Swedish book agencies, and the author is as old as me. I know this girl. I've hung with her on two camps in 2011 and 2013, and I even made an effort to be her friend. She was not the easiest girl to befriend, and has since deleted her facebook and old blog, and she didn't have an IG before last year.

But I found her new blog two years ago, and she lived (lives?) a life I wouldn't for my life want. Her life was all about escaping life itself. It was about partying away responsibilities, bying a plane ticket to some Eastern European capital without even having a hotel booked and smoking crack in the search for inspiration for her book.

I have now almost read the book and I don't like it. What the book's been praised for is the fact that the main characters are lesbian and gay, which is "so original". Well, not for me. A lesbian/gay norm is the one I lived in for years online (without being lesbian myself). But I by no means minimize the importance of having good rep for queer characters, but WHY DO IT IN THE FORM OF HAVING YOUR LESBIAN CHARACTERS DYING BY SUICIDE AND NOT BEING CAPABLE OF TAKING CARE OF THEMSELVES?

As you may know, I do enjoy suicide in fiction, but here, if the book want to give good rep to queer characters, then it shouldn't do it by giving mental illnesses to each and everyone of them.

You may also know I use mental illness myself in my characters, but I use it differently than in this book. I make an issue out of it. I, even if I glamorize it, also problematize it. This novel doesn't. It makes mental illnesses normal. It put living without parents, not knowing anything in life and having no goals and no happiness and just misery, in a good light. As if this is, or should be, the norm for youngsters (and specifically mentally ill queer youngsters).


This book has all ingredients for a good story for me. Mental illnesses, queer, angsty teenage-y, y'know me by know, stuff I use in my own stories as well. But it's poorly executed. It's not as good as I wish it was.

I'm just dissappointed.