Be More Chill

Content Warning: This entry discusses death by suicide.

Vizzini was born in 1981 and grew up in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, an elite college-preparatory public school with a highly competitive admissions process. His first book Teen Angst? Naaah… (2000) is a memoir of his experiences in high school and is based on columns that he published in New York newspapers. Be More Chill is Vizzini’s first novel, and it was also inspired by many of his adolescent experiences. His second novel, It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2006), is based upon the time that Vizzini spent in the hospital for clinical depression in an adult psychiatric facility in 2004. In both of Vizzini’s novels, teenage characters have mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, which Vizzini also experienced.

While his works treat the subject of teenage mental health seriously, the tone of his novels is largely comedic. He satirizes the absurdity of adolescence and the way that society treats people with mental health conditions. Vizzini died by suicide in 2013. Because much of his fiction was drawn from his own life, authors who knew him remarked that his