“years of a kind of grey, bleak, empty well-being” that made true creative work impossible, consigning him to “apathy, spiritlessness, blank sobriety, and a vegetable health.” Jackson decided he believed in the Faustian bargain after all, believed in the choice between sobriety and genius. “Should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence,” he wondered, “and thus be freed from my healthy prison, free once more from fear, able to function as a writer again?” After years of Möbius-strip sobriety—in and out, on and off—Jackson finally committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal in
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