I grew up in a home where my mother’s continual threats to kill herself were the ghosts that silently haunted our hallways. Never once did I speak to a friend about it, and our entire family bowed their head in shame when the ambulance pulled into the driveway.

When I was 21, my mother succeeded in ending her life, but for me the story of depression and suicide definitely did not end there. I was already on the path of my own self-destruction.

Eventually, I would write candidly about the years following her death, and the journey I made, back from the catastrophe of my own illness to the triumph of my recovery. And in this way, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide became the most significant book of the seven I have written.

As the renowned “confessional” poet Anne Sexton, my mother wrote about suicide and depression freely. She was one of the first brave souls to begin to bring suicide and depression out of the closet, despite the persistent stigma about mental illness and suicide that has haunted our society since the middle ages—when those who killed themselves were denied burial in churchyard cemeteries and were relegated instead to the crossroads, where it was believed the wind would disperse their disease.

Even today, many people still speak of depression and suicide in a whisper.

My mother did leave me a legacy of depression and suicide, but she also left me another legacy: she always said, “Linda, tell it true.” She meant that the most important thing a writer could do was to roll out the truth, regardless of what boundaries might be crossed.

For years I wrote fiction, in which I disguised the stories from my own life into the stories of my characters’. But when I began to encounter the same depths of depression that my mother had, I just couldn’t put those feelings into the mind of a character. Suddenly it mattered terribly that it come from only one place: the depths of an undisguised me.

All of this was what compelled me to write about my own journey through the legacy of depression and suicide, and then—and perhaps most importantly—about my own recovery.

Since the book was published in January, I have been getting scads of mail from those who feel deeply grateful because they have a voice, someone speaking for them, at last—whether they are someone depressed, someone who has a link to a depressed or suicidal person, or someone who has considered suicide himself.

Over a million people succumb to suicide annually; someone kills himself every seventeen minutes; suicide is twice as prevalent as homicide; and it is the third leading cause of death of teenagers.

Is it surprising then, that nearly everyone I encounter has a story to tell? Ultimately, this is what compelled me to tell my own—which was a risky thing to do. Getting “naked” in public isn’t easy, and the motivation to make yourself so openly vulnerable is not to achieve some sort of personal catharsis. For this reason when any kind of literary review comes in, I slide it underneath an email from a reader. My readers are what matter to me the most, whether they criticize or compliment.

I believe we all need, more than ever before, to begin to talk about suicide and depression openly. We need to support those we love—to care about anyone who suffers from this lonely disease. My hope is that after reading Half in Love, other people won’t let those who are depressed fade out of their lives, but will help restore them, instead, to health.