The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order
By:
Joan Wickersham
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Average Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5
Description:
When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying “I’m gone and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.” Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index—that most formal and orderly of structures—Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history—marriage, parents, business failures—and every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father.
Publisher: Harcourt
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Honesty over Sentimentality - Wickersham simultaneously tells the story of and tries to come to terms with her father's suicide. I respect the author's willingness to avoid sentimentality and easy answers in favor of the ambiguity and uncertainty left behind. This honest and difficult book is a valuable read for folks whose lives have forever been altered by suicide. I also think this book would be useful for someone who has not personally been touched by suicide but wants to understand the legacy and long-ranging impact that lasts long after the fact.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
An Intimate Account - In this engrossing nonfiction work, the author traces the events surrounding the loss of her father in an eminently readable and gripping fashion. Suspense and empathy dominate this narrative wherein family secrets and dynamics are gradually uncovered and revealed
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
An elegant memoir of an inexplicable act. - Wickersham looks behind the scenes of her father's life to try to find the answer to "why". A troubled marriage, a difficult childhood spent in two countries with very narcissistic parents, bad-luck in business...all these factors (and many more) contribute to the troubled mind of Wickersham's father when he committed suicide at the age of 61.
Wickersham doesn't seem to come to any certain conclusions of the decisive reason her father did what he did, but she does piece "things" together to help herself cope with the act, both at the time and in the years following his death.
She's a good writer and the words flow with a deft fluency.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A powerful and original memoir. - All memoirs are about memory; but suicide poses a special challenge. As Joan Wickersham writes: "When you kill yourself, you kill every memory anyone has of you." And later: "If you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide. Your death becomes your definition." The Suicide Index starts when Wickersham's father kills himself; it goes backward in time, exploring his past like a detective; and then it carries us forward to show what this mysterious and destructive act did to her family. The writing is spare, but vivid - every word counts, every scene comes alive. The chapters are arranged alphabetically, in index format. It's a device that gains power as the book proceeds; it gives a shape to all the different stories that Wickersham tells us, and all the different ways she has of telling them. In her book Wickersham has met the challenge of suicide: she has restored her memory of her father, and in some sense restored his life. The Suicide Index is, quite simply, the most powerful and original memoir I've ever read.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
If you have been affected by suicide, read this - Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order is best described as engaging, gripping and candid.
Wickersham leads us through her father's final moments. She reveals details of this confusing tragedy in a family's life--suicide. Those who commit suicide leave loved ones with a black hole of unanswerable questions. Anyone who has been touched by suicide knows the pain of never fully understanding or resolving this aspect of life.
The author seeks to unravel the mystery of her father's suicide by investigating anyone who knew him. She reflects on her own memories, both as a child and an adult to find reason for his drastic act of selfishness. As much as we'd like to know everything about those closest to us, there are limitations. Can we really comprehend the mind of someone else?
Gently and transparently Wickersham reveals her phases of denial, anger, hopelessness and grief. She searches for a murderer, rejecting the idea that her father would have ended his life. She wishes blame on her mother, her father's business partners and associates. Was it a jealous neighbor? A so-called friend? Finding no answers, she settles that her father did take his own life-and he left no clues.
Wickersham struggles to live daily life as a mother and wife, sister and daughter, as everything comes into question. Is it all a lie? Does she view her father through rose-colored glasses? Did he suffer an undetected medical condition?
Walking the high road of inspection and low road of introspection simultaneously, I must agree with the author that suicide is difficult to understand. The search for answers is evasive and frustrating. I discovered along with Wickersham the conspicuous void in my family album left by one who committed suicide. Nevertheless, life goes on.
Armchair Interviews says: A book worth reading for anyone whose life has been affected by suicide.
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