Julian Barnes: I contemplated suicide after the death of my wife He adds: "You might expect those closest to you in age and sex and marital status to understand best. What a naivety. I remember a 'dinner-table conversation" in a restaurant with three married friends of roughly my age. Each had known her for many years - perhaps 80 or 90 in total - and each would have said, if asked, that they loved her. I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke, being p----- off at what struck me not as good manners but cowardice. Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worse of them for it. Barnes, who has been known for more cryptic works, also admitted considering suicide after her death. "The question of suicide arrives early, and quite logically," he writes. I knew soon enough my preferred method - a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife. I thought of that solution fairly often, and still do. But he decided his end would be akin to a second death of his wife, since he was "her principal rememberer." He says he is now equipped with a "firm argument" against suicide, but admits the temptation remains. Last month, Barnes spoke out in favour of assisted dying, telling The Daily Telegraph: "I always thought it was every human's right to kill yourself if you want to and I think it's terrible that people have to go to Switzerland and have their relatives threatened with lawsuits or criminal prosecution when they are obviously of sound mind but terrifyingly unsound body." Levels of Life, to be published on April 4, is composed of three parts. The third and longest is a memoir about mourning Kavanagh. He has written on death before, winning the Man Booker prize 18 months ago for The Sense of an Ending, a novel about regret and memory featuring a suicide. A treatise on death, Nothing to be Frightened Of, was published months before his wife was found to have cancer. She died 37 days after her diagnosis.