The Suicide Index

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.

Looking at the book's title and the reviews, I couldn't bear to think anyone out there might miss out on the Suicide Index or think it's not for them if they haven't experienced the suicide of someone close to them. This is a beautiful, most real account--I can't shake it--of all that's human, family, love and loss, being a child and a parent. Joan Wickersham has found a brilliant way to tell the truth about one of the hardest things for human nature to tell the truth about: We can't make sense of death, attempts to index are futile. Which is why this perfect book is anything but. I went back and bought her novel the Paper Anniversary and can't wait to see what Wickersham can do with fiction, too.

One of the edgiest topics for the human being to explain to oneself, let alone set down for an audience : suicide. Perhaps easier if one's own intended is the story but this is a father's suicide taken on by his eldest and perhaps favorite daughter. Joan Wickersham does something brilliant and highly original in what is both a journal and a once-upon-a-time consideration of a man's life. In compelling yet often dispassionate and sometimes hilarious chapters, Wickersham considers the facts about her family's biographical and social, bodily and geographical conditions as clues to the inevitability of this death. In an almost seamless and well-paced manner, Wickersham makes it possible for the reader easily to join her in turning over pieces of clothing, pastry, furniture, or trinkets with the possibility always present that there is not just an explanation for this tragedy but an (imaginary) reversal of the fact that this man has willingly removed himself forever from life. This is the story of a mid-20th century individual set before us by the writer's ease with which she slips contemporary events in with narratives about a disparate cast of artistic, impractical, cruel, aristocratic, and forceful forebearers. She offers us the earnest 1950's Americans and their aspirations in the post WW II business world alongside the disengaged WASP yacht and horse set of 1980's; the uncertain intimacy of the psychiatrist's quiet, with a tremulous, frustrated mother's voice to an inarticulate, depressed young child. And we are taken to both dark or comic corners : the anatomically specific autopsy report read by a daughter of her father's body, an unconventional Dance institute performance by an aging doyenne observed by an embarrassed father and granddaughter; we meet the dopplegangers of her father who Wickersham embraces, as well as her plump, self-deluding mother who perpetuates failures of romance even in her years of decrepitude. Wickersham has a particularly clever but highly original take on certain quarters of American life - early 20th century cultural immigrants, the educated and aspiring of the Eastcoast, the perserverance of children faced with the incomprehesible, with abandonment. But this is not a sappy tale nor leaden, but it's a dense one which moves quickly and somehow, like the daughter-writer, we want one more chapter; we don't seem to want an end to the facts of a suicide. Helpfully, she incorporates a strong bibliographic epilogue of Western writers on the topic of suicide, couching the auto-biographical issue with which she is faced, in sturdy, graceful objectivity. The reader easily comes along on every page with this reluctant, brave, and highly intelligent daughter as she attempts to assume and then banish responsibility for her parent's suicide.

Wickersham takes a very tragic experience, applying a logical index to ungovernable feelings, penning a memoir of her father's suicide that is honest, painstaking and filled with emotional landmines. From the morning she receives the call from her distraught mother, to years later, still grappling with the complicated feelings- acceptable and unacceptable- that plague her life after this loss, the author exquisitely describes the long, dark torment of those left behind by such an act of self-annihilation. The first response, of course, is numbness, a soft-lensed vacuum that allows the family to survive the early days of shock, the outpouring of support from friends and relatives, with the occasional flash of inexplicable rage that lurks beneath the surface. It is the following years that dominate her grieving process, thinking and rethinking what could have been done to prevent the suicide, to intervene. The elephant in the room, of course, is the undeniable violence of such an action, so heinous and selfish as to belie any daughter's memories of a loving, slightly eccentric father, a man carrying the scars of a brutal childhood and a lack of business sense that adversely affects his family's financial security. The bonds between this eldest daughter and her father are like steel cables; she favors him over her mother, with whom she has an uneasy, somewhat antagonistic relationship, especially after the suicide, the mother flapping wildly through her own jumble of confused emotions, both guilty and self-defensive, left pondering the interminable, unanswerable question: why? Although the author has a sister, it is the nature of such a loss that the sibling is hardly mentioned. This is an intense, solitary journey, an anguished, chronically self-obsessed need for answers, a patient husband dealing with the fall out years later. Wickersham catalogs every nuance, every instinct, every possibility, trapped in a dilemma not of her own making, her life haunted years after the pivotal event. She is stuck, unable to move forward, happiness no longer a viable expectation. It is to this writer's credit that I continue to read this memoir: I didn't particularly like her father or his final resolution to overwhelming problems. On the other hand, neither have I experienced the kind of bond shared by this man and his daughter. No, I was in it for the experience, willing to follow wherever Wickersham might lead. If she has the courage to flay her soul in search of answers, who am I to shy away? "It's a crooked, looping, labyrinthine story." Indeed, it is and one with no easy answers or facile resolutions. I hope this troubled man appreciated his extraordinary child and her capacity for compassion. I doubt I would have been as forgiving. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

Every once in a while a book comes along that you know will be classic. Such a book is Joan Wickersham's eloquent and honest account of her father's suicide. The book works brilliantly on a number of levels. It is a deeply moving work that sheds great light on the ripple effects of a suicide. Wickersham's writing is so captivating that you feel like you're taking this journey with her, right in the present moment. Beyond this, "The Suicide Index" is an exploration into how we construct and reconstruct our past to make sense of our lives. The use of the index is so integral to the telling of this story it's impossible to see how any other format would have worked. All of this is to say that the book will obviously appeal to those touched by suicide, but it should also be required reading for anyone interested in the memoir. "The Suicide Index" is a rare find these days: a truly original piece of literature.