Drama Queen

SUICIDE-EVEN threatened suicide-is only rarely something to laugh at, and it's certainly not our intention to laugh here. If anything, last week's highly publicized (if brief) disappearance and initially assumed suicide of Helen DeWitt was just plain annoying.

DeWitt, author of the critically acclaimed 2000 novel The Last Samurai ("not," as the Daily News took pleasure noting, "the basis for the Tom Cruise movie of the same name") vanished from her Staten Island apartment early Tuesday morning. According to witnesses, she climbed on a bus headed for the ferry terminal. Before leaving, she sent out a mass email to her friends, an electronic suicide note under the heading: "Termination."

Oh, Christ. We can see her now, typing the note, pausing occasionally to cast the back of her hand across her eyes in a classic Plathian "woe is me" gesture. The note read, in part: "Call my cell phone, and if I don't answer call my landlord to get in my apartment because I'll be dead."

She wanted her friends to wake up to this. If she were our friend, our first impulse would have been to slap her-not call the landlord.

Then, of course, the following day, the writer was found, quite alive, standing in line at a hot dog stand in Niagara Falls. She told authorities that she just needed "to be left alone" in order to "clear her head." It was further reported that she pulled the same stunt four years ago, resurfacing after two weeks.

Now's the time for any true friend of hers (if she has any left) to really give DeWitt a slap. We might also suggest that this delicate and sensitive flower, this attention-starved former child of privilege consider titling her next book The Girl Who Cried Wolf and Ended Up with an Empty Funeral, because it sure will be interesting to see how people react the next time she does this.