I remember clearly the first time I thought about killing myself — thought about it as a serious proposition, something it was actually within my power to do. My mother caught me in the bathroom, cutting my legs with my dad's razor — not self-harming, just a clumsy first attempt to shave. She told me I was too young to start shaving my legs. I was setting myself up for a lifetime of misery, she said. I pointed out that I already had a life of misery, thank you, and if I had to endure one more day at school with those kids calling me werewolf, I would just have to kill myself. I was 11 years old.

I don't remember what my mother said; she probably laughed and rolled her eyes: the child's being melodramatic again. But once I had considered the possibility, I held on to it secretly, tucked it away like a coin I could always spend as a last resort, if things got really bad.

I thought about it many more times over the next few years, most seriously around 14/15, when the bullying was at its worst, but I never mentioned it to anyone. I thought they would tell me not to be silly. Depression was not much talked about when I was a teen, in the late 1980s; I knew it only as a grand, important thing that afflicted famous dead artists. It was not a word I would ever have applied to my own dark moods. Thank God we had Morrissey or I would have felt no one understood.