Molly Notkin's party: Joelle's overdose (ii)
He killed himself less than ninety days later. Fewer than ninety days? How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? […] How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt? She cannot remember thinking of it once in four years. Did she kill him, somehow, just inclining veilless over that lens?
Context
JOI's suicide contemplated by the woman whose face was his last film — the engineering questions (the tape, the refrigerator-light button) as the mind's only way to hold the fact, tipping into the guilt question underneath. "How much must a person want out" is Kate's "I just wanted out" applied to the father whose death organizes the book.