Status
Available
Collection
Publication
Orlando : Harcourt, c2008.
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member tara35
In 1991 Joan Wickersham's father committed suicide. In 2008 her memoir, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order, was published. Wickersham uses The Sucide Index as a way to try to make sense of her father's death. For this reason, she chooses to write this book in an unique way, in
What I enjoyed most about The Suicide Index is Wickersham's honesty. This could not have been an easy story to tell for her or for her family. Wickersham's mother, while often charming and funny, receives the most harsh treatment, as we learn how she treated her husband, before and after his death. Wickersham cannot help wondering if her mother's desire for a more extravagant life, her self-absorbed nature, her friendship with another man, helped lead to her husband's final act. What about his business dealings, the money he owed, how did this contribute? And why now? Her father had seen hard times in the past, grew up with an abusive parent, was it one event or a series of life's disappointments that pushed him over the edge? And how does this bode for Wickersham - is she or her children at risk of suicidal tendencies, too? Wickersham considers all these facts, as she attempts to find answers, and figure out who was this man she thought she knew. Her father is not only gone and unable to provide any answers, but is also considered and classified as 'a suicide'.
I probably wouldn't have read this book had it not been offered to me for review, but I'm glad I did as it is quite moving and Wickersham is a gifted writer. I haven't experienced suicide in my own family, but as Wickersham finds, many people have who seem to find some healing in sharing their stories. While those affected by suicide will especially find much to identify with in this book, this is also a story of a father and daughter, a mother and daughter, and we can all identify with that.
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that of an index. I was a bit skeptical but found that this 'index' really works because it represents the struggle that Wickersham went through to make sense of these events in her life. All of these stories and observations make up Wickersham's realizations, but not necessarily in a sequential way.What I enjoyed most about The Suicide Index is Wickersham's honesty. This could not have been an easy story to tell for her or for her family. Wickersham's mother, while often charming and funny, receives the most harsh treatment, as we learn how she treated her husband, before and after his death. Wickersham cannot help wondering if her mother's desire for a more extravagant life, her self-absorbed nature, her friendship with another man, helped lead to her husband's final act. What about his business dealings, the money he owed, how did this contribute? And why now? Her father had seen hard times in the past, grew up with an abusive parent, was it one event or a series of life's disappointments that pushed him over the edge? And how does this bode for Wickersham - is she or her children at risk of suicidal tendencies, too? Wickersham considers all these facts, as she attempts to find answers, and figure out who was this man she thought she knew. Her father is not only gone and unable to provide any answers, but is also considered and classified as 'a suicide'.
I probably wouldn't have read this book had it not been offered to me for review, but I'm glad I did as it is quite moving and Wickersham is a gifted writer. I haven't experienced suicide in my own family, but as Wickersham finds, many people have who seem to find some healing in sharing their stories. While those affected by suicide will especially find much to identify with in this book, this is also a story of a father and daughter, a mother and daughter, and we can all identify with that.
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LibraryThing member maritimer
Can a narrative thread be imposed on someone else's life? Does the narrative that we inhabit bear much resemblance to any plausible reality? Are we ultimately limited in our attempts to understand others to discrete, disconnected, and opaque 'entries'? While the central point of reference in this
One of the admirable aspects of this book is also one of the most off-putting: Wickersham's writerly, critical detachment is on full display as she works her way through the aftermath of the suicide. We do not usually see a novelist wrestling with options for how to best create or recreate action, character, or dialogue - we just see the result. In this book though, we see inside the writing. We see her bravely but unsuccessfully struggling to somehow reach a literary resolution. When that diligence is brought to such an intimate arena, it can seem cold at times, and the reader feels like an uncomfortable intruder. Try as she might Wickersham cannot transform this apple into an orange.
The book did remind me of William Stafford's poem: "the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep". The poet does assume though, that we can decode those signals. Joan Wickersham would beg to differ.
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book is Joan Wickersham's father's suicide, these are the questions that surface and resurface throughout. "Aren't lives apples and stories oranges?", asks the author. The literary conceit of the title, the 'index', is all that Wickersham is left with after many years of trying other ways to salvage some kind of narrative meaning from her father's life. Fictionalizing it does not work - the one chapter where she imagines her father's thoughts as he is reunited with his father after many years, is unconvincing. After so much insistence on how little she ultimately understands about her father, the artifice and inauthenticity of the fictionalized encounter cannot help but jump out at the reader. And yet we readers 'fall' for fiction and memoir all the time, we embrace the literary narratives that match the way we frame our own lives. We 'read' our own lives linearly from page one. We assume that we can 'read' other lives in the same way, but a suicide calls this into question. As Joan Wickersham does, we find ourselves working backwards from the index, trying to imagine others' intentions and creating an understandable story from it. One of the admirable aspects of this book is also one of the most off-putting: Wickersham's writerly, critical detachment is on full display as she works her way through the aftermath of the suicide. We do not usually see a novelist wrestling with options for how to best create or recreate action, character, or dialogue - we just see the result. In this book though, we see inside the writing. We see her bravely but unsuccessfully struggling to somehow reach a literary resolution. When that diligence is brought to such an intimate arena, it can seem cold at times, and the reader feels like an uncomfortable intruder. Try as she might Wickersham cannot transform this apple into an orange.
The book did remind me of William Stafford's poem: "the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep". The poet does assume though, that we can decode those signals. Joan Wickersham would beg to differ.
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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
Make what you will of the book's eponymous title gimmick, which organizes the book as if it were an index. This is a thorough, heartfelt meditation on the author's decision to take his own life and how it rippled through his family decades afterwards. The author's honest about her desire to
Of course, "The Suicide Index" is a lot of verbiage about one subject, and this may try a lot of readers' patience. She talks about her own family and even about her relationship with her therapist at length. She's also -- consciously -- a product of Connecticut's comfortable bourgeois, and this aesthetic may not be to some readers' taste, especially since her mother, especially in the last sections of the book, comes off as a rather unsympathetic example of this group. Still, the book succeeds. While she includes a lot of thinking about the act of suicide that looks at the topic from a number of philosophical perspectives, she seems to sense that there's something eternally opaque about the act and her father's decision to go through with it. What she finds out about before and after her father's decision to end his own life is still plenty worthwhile, though. Recommended to those with a special interest in death, dying, and the mechanics of family trauma.
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identify the one element that explains her father's final act, and, but, after failing to do so, offers an admirably complete portrait of the man she knew, the one she didn't get to know, and his family history. Clear-eyed but still emotional, this book seems like both scholarly endeavor and an act of personal bravery. What emerges is a portrait of a talented, interesting man who'd survived a few rough circumstances but somehow failed to make it all fit together. By the time I finished the book, I felt that his suicide was, of course, important to his story, but didn't really define him. This, I think,is what the author might have wanted: she complains early on how suicide seems to obscure the people who commit it, changing them from merely "troubled" into people who become social untouchables. Of course, "The Suicide Index" is a lot of verbiage about one subject, and this may try a lot of readers' patience. She talks about her own family and even about her relationship with her therapist at length. She's also -- consciously -- a product of Connecticut's comfortable bourgeois, and this aesthetic may not be to some readers' taste, especially since her mother, especially in the last sections of the book, comes off as a rather unsympathetic example of this group. Still, the book succeeds. While she includes a lot of thinking about the act of suicide that looks at the topic from a number of philosophical perspectives, she seems to sense that there's something eternally opaque about the act and her father's decision to go through with it. What she finds out about before and after her father's decision to end his own life is still plenty worthwhile, though. Recommended to those with a special interest in death, dying, and the mechanics of family trauma.
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LibraryThing member doxtator
It is the style of the narrative that makes this book so powerful, especially given the topic that it centers around--the author's father's suicide. The book stretches forwards and backwards in time, developing topics and letting others drift away. In many ways, it is an uncomfortable book to
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read--you wish you could see the individuals to better take a gauge of them, and yet, the book conveys them deeply, through brief, graceful strokes. It is not a book with answers. It has more dead-ends than anything else when it turns to coming to terms with the father's action, and the reader is given a sense of the long journey that all survivors must harrow through afterwards. The index format works well for this topic, allowing different aspects of what happened to be dealt with, even if no concrete resolution is ever reached for the author. Show Less
LibraryThing member TimBazzett
I'm not sure I have ever read a book so nearly unrelievedly grim as The Suicide Index. While there are flashes of humor here and there - of the gallows variety - the tone of this memoir is, for the most part, pretty sobering, sad and, most of all, I think, angry. The anger is directed at, in nearly
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equal parts, the author's father, who did the ghastly deed, and her mother, who may well have been at least partly responsible for her husband's poor career decisions, most certainly for their hopeless financial plight, and probably for his obvious feelings of inadequacy and despair. In any case, I can understand why the book was a finalist for the National Book Award. The writing is beautiful and conveys in both heartbreakingly personal and coldly objective terms the ever-widening ripples and repercussions of this oh-so desperate and final act. In that respect, it is an admirably professional piece of work. Even so, this book-long meditaion of self-murder could hardly be called a pleasant read, and not a book I could heartily recommend. It was, in my experience, one excruciatingly long wince. I can't even begin to imagine how painful it must have been for Wickersham to write it. Cathartic, I'm sure, but it also had to hurt like hell. Show Less
LibraryThing member MarkPSadler
A compelling look at suicide from the point of view of the grieving daughter as she shares the families thoughts and questions and blames. Her father shot himself and left no note. They troll through his recent past history, from his depression, his failed business, loans that had come due and
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family failings, each family member attempting to reconstruct the why's and wherefores and providing a look at the family dynamic years hence and how totally decimated a family can be when faced with such a tragedy. Show Less
LibraryThing member MarkPSadler
A compelling look at suicide from the point of view of the grieving daughter as she shares the families thoughts and questions and blames. Her father shot himself and left no note. They troll through his recent past history, from his depression, his failed business, loans that had come due and
Show More
family failings, each family member attempting to reconstruct the why's and wherefores and providing a look at the family dynamic years hence and how totally decimated a family can be when faced with such a tragedy. Show Less
LibraryThing member MarkPSadler
A compelling look at suicide from the point of view of the grieving daughter as she shares the families thoughts and questions and blames. Her father shot himself and left no note. They troll through his recent past history, from his depression, his failed business, loans that had come due and
Show More
family failings, each family member attempting to reconstruct the why's and wherefores and providing a look at the family dynamic years hence and how totally decimated a family can be when faced with such a tragedy. Show Less
LibraryThing member Narshkite
This is an extraordinary book, and one that is hard to sum up. The foundational events around which the memoir is built are easy to identify. One morning Joan Wickersham's father wakes up, gets dressed, makes his breakfast, makes decaf for himself and real coffee for his wife which he leaves at her
This book is about being left in that rubble. It is about the dozen or so years following Wickersham's father's suicide, and her driving need to find answers, to put order and meaning around something so disorderly and unexplainable. The book is brutally honest, and throws into relief fractures in the "happy family" people might think they had, it tears down the lies we tell ourselves about our parents and it humanizes them, it digs into the ugly side of mother-daughter and spousal relationships, it does not shy away from vanity and self-centeredness and anger. This is it, this is what suicide leaves in its wake. This is clear-eyed, not at all sentimental or sensational, it is almost terse, and it is creative in its structure not for creativity's sake, but because the structure enhances the communicative heft of the story without defining how you, the reader, should feel. Brilliant.
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bedside, brings in the paper, walks up to his study and sticks a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. No note and no real warning signs (though in hindsight there were many things that might be interpreted that way.) That act then came to define Wickersham's life, her husband's and to some extent her children's lives, her mother's and sister's lives, and the lives of everyone around them. People talk about suicide these days like it is a choice every person can make for themselves and there is so fallout. For those of us who are left behind (my loss to suicide was an ex-boyfriend of many years) we know this to be untrue. Wickersham says something in the book about the term "commit suicide" which resonated now that there is a movement afoot to erase that term from language and replace it with "died by suicide." She said that people "commit suicide" against those they leave behind, that even if it is not an act of aggression it is an act of reckless indifference to the impact on those left in the rubble, those who realize they never really knew a person who was one of the most important people in their lives. (This is obviously not intended on my part to cover suicides attributable to chronic and/or terminal illness. Nobody is left to wonder about the reasons for the choice to take ones life in that case, to feel like everything that came before was a lie.)This book is about being left in that rubble. It is about the dozen or so years following Wickersham's father's suicide, and her driving need to find answers, to put order and meaning around something so disorderly and unexplainable. The book is brutally honest, and throws into relief fractures in the "happy family" people might think they had, it tears down the lies we tell ourselves about our parents and it humanizes them, it digs into the ugly side of mother-daughter and spousal relationships, it does not shy away from vanity and self-centeredness and anger. This is it, this is what suicide leaves in its wake. This is clear-eyed, not at all sentimental or sensational, it is almost terse, and it is creative in its structure not for creativity's sake, but because the structure enhances the communicative heft of the story without defining how you, the reader, should feel. Brilliant.
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Subjects
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Nonfiction — 2008)
Salon Book Award (2008)
Massachusetts Book Award (Must-Read (Longlist) — Nonfiction — 2009)
Notable Books List (Nonfiction — 2009)
Physical description
316 p.; 22 cm
ISBN
9780151014903