You can't catch death : a daughter's memoir

by Ianthe Brautigan

Hardcover, 2000

Status

Available

Publication

New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Description

Ianthe Brautigan was nine years old when her father, the Californian Beat writer Richard Brautigan, first told her he wanted to commit suicide. She was twenty-four, when he finally took his own life with a shotgun in the Montana countryside.This memoir is Ianthe's attempt to make sense of her famous father's suicide. What emerges in the book is a moving account of a complex, witty, caring man. A hero of the '50s and'60s counter-culture who had to endure watching fame and critical praise fade away as he drifted into relative obscurity.Written with a clarity of recall, an understanding wit and with real control and pace, You Can't Catch Death is a fascinating insight into the legendary man, and the daughter left behind.

User reviews

LibraryThing member wandering_star
The title of this book comes from something that IB's mother said to her shortly after they had found out about the suicide of her father, Richard Brautigan. The book is a memoir, largely made up of snippets of her memories of her father, interleaved with her own story as she comes to terms with
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the fact that he killed himself. The reminiscences of her father will be of interest to fans - I haven't read much of his stuff but even so there were a couple of occasions when I recognised something which must have made its way from real life into his books. But the parts about her own reactions are curiously unrevealing. I don't know if this was because she didn't want to reveal too much about herself, or she just wasn't very self-aware, or she was striving for the deadpan Brautigan style - but it doesn't make for very interesting reading, mean though it seems to say this about such a terrible story (you certainly get the impression that Brautigan found the writing, or at least the process that she went through while writing, very therapeutic).
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LibraryThing member bookinmind
Read this book if you are captivated by Richard Brautigan's writings and want to know about both the love and the emotional pain he bestowed upon his daughter.

Language

Local notes

signed by author

Barcode

3637
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