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18 Banal suicide. Writ small, committed in private space, offstage, not performed, resistant to mythology, unnoticed, unrecorded, a minor thing. Impossible to romanticize or mythologize a suicide carried out in the most private room of the house: the bathroom, a space off-limits even to other family members, where dissocial acts are performed in solitude. The dull setting of his final act was appropriate to his station in life. Joel was not a celebrated figure, someone of public note. He was a substitute teacher—someone never to become permanent. But even a famous figure can exit stage banal. The barnstorming poet Vachel Lindsay, who chanted his verse before thousands, drank a bottle of Lysol in the bathroom. ...

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