The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order | 
 enlarge | Author: Joan Wickersham
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 63430
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0151014906
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.937092
EAN: 9780151014903
ASIN: 0151014906
Publication Date: August 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Z-2
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Product 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
An elegant memoir of an inexplicable act. October 11, 2008
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.
A powerful and original memoir. October 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
If you have been affected by suicide, read this August 13, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
For everyone who will die someday or know someone who will August 12, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
Elegantly, objectively and with great wit and depth August 2, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
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.
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