These few, simple words uttered within the first few pages of A Cure for Suicide capture the essence of Jesse Ball's strange and beautiful tale.
It is set in an indefinite future where the last and greatest challenge facing society is isolation and where those who feel they cannot continue may request permission to start over completely.
If the claimant's petition is accepted, he or she will awaken as a tabula rasa, with no name or memory, shorn of all knowledge of their past and who they used to be.
Guided by an examiner whose job it is to create a new identity for them, they are guided through a series of carefully choreographed tests and challenges that will, if successful, allow the claimant to re-enter society.
However, the process is reliant on both the successful erasure of all memory of the claimant's past life and their ignorance of the cure itself.
Some may reintegrate fully and often go on to become examiners themselves, but others, particularly those for whom multiple erasures are required to fully eliminate the past, will remain in the artificial world of the cure, blissfully unaware of their own confinement.
In today's autonomy-focused culture this seems almost unthinkable; what would constitute informed consent for such a procedure, which results in death of the patient in all but the physical sense and gives prospective permission for ongoing - and undisclosed - treatment of the ''new'' person thus created.
Ball skilfully guides us through the ethical and philosophical difficulties from the perspective of one such unnamed claimant as he undergoes two courses of treatment, each overseen by different examiners.
The first of these fails soon after his awakening as he becomes increasingly troubled by nightmares and troubling recollections, but the second progresses well until he is introduced to a young woman who suggests that he is subject to a conspiracy that, even if benignly intended, means his entire life is built upon a lie.
Is she telling the truth, a troubled fellow claimant, or another player in the very fiction she claims he is subject to?
And what does it mean for his recovery?
These events constitute the first half of the book and are written in sparse, widely spaced text that reflects the punctuated nature of the central character's consciousness.
It is followed by a dense, unbroken account of the claimant's initial assessment in which we learn of the events he has opted to leave behind, before providing an epilogue that raises as many questions as it answers.
I was left feeling that, on balance, the potential benefits of the cure outweigh its risks but troubled by the sense that somewhere in the process the claimant has chosen to sacrifice himself at some fundamental level.
I am already looking forward to rereading it.
• Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
