When is it morally defensible to take one’s own life? Whenever, might be the first response: it is, after all, one’s own life. While the church still regards it as a grave sin, attempted suicide is not a crime, though helping someone else to commit suicide is. Yet does not a desire to end one’s life at a time of one’s own choosing have to be weighed against the pain it might cause others? Is suicide not a statement to family and friends that whatever love, care and support they have given, it was not enough?

Gillian Bouras, who has written a book about her sister’s suicide, appears to find the act morally unjustifiable. ‘If ever any of you contemplates doing this, please spare a thought for your brothers,’ she says angrily to her sons on learning of her sister’s death. Bouras’s sister Jacqueline, known as Jacqui, died in a South Yarra flat on 18 December 1996, at the age of fifty, following a ‘meticulously planned’ drug overdose. Bouras, living in Greece with her Greek husband and three sons, received the news over the telephone from her father. This honest, disturbing book is an attempt by Bouras to come to terms with her sister’s death and with her own troubled relationship with her.