Photo: Thomas Wickersham
![THE SUICIDE INDEX: Putting My Father’s Death in Order
2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST •
A 2008 ALA Notable Book • A 2009 Ken Book Award winner, National Alliance on Mental Illness • A Washington Post Best Book of 2008
• A Boston Globe Most Memorable Title of 2008 • A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2008 • A Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of 2008
• A New York magazine Top Ten Book of 2008 • A Week magazine Top Ten Book of 2008 • A Top 100 Editors’ Pick on Amazon.com
• A 2008 Salon.com Book Award winner
Written in the form of an index, an acknowledgment of Wickersham's inability to frame her father's act in any conventionally linear form, this memoir is written in a cool, economical and ultimately piercing style utterly devoid of easy pathos or cliché. Anyone prone to facile dismissals of the memoir as literary high art should be silenced by the perfection of Wickersham's prose and her ability to hold the facts and her feelings up to the light, turning them again and again to reveal yet another facet of grief, anger, love, pity and guilt.
– Laura Miller, Salon.com, Salon Book Awards 2008
An extraordinary, magical mystery tour of a book.
– Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times
Honest, brave, incredibly moving, and completely unflinching in its honesty. It’s one of those rare books that will haunt you for a long time after you finish it. . . . Wickersham's writing is gorgeous, restrained and lyrical at the same time . . . [She] uses the format of an index, in an attempt to impose an order and shape on what appears to be a chaotic, perhaps random, act of her father's. . . . [An] amazing memoir.
– Nancy Pearl, KUOW / National Public Radio
Profound and finally uplifting.
– People magazine
Joan Wickersham's deceptively simple organization of this volume packs a hard jab to the throat, and I found myself alternately holding my breath and looking away from the words on the page in stunned silence. Reading this book is a physical act - of beauty, of pain and of frankness. The sections on writing and truth are some of the finest I've seen.
– Kelly McMasters, Newsday
[Finds] the elusive golden mean between grief and humor, sentimentality and cynicism, spontaneity and art.
– New York, “The Top Ten Books”
[A] remarkable memoir. . . she exposes the whole messy territory of inheritance, of heritage, of what our families leave us, the treacherous trail of genetics and psychology and unhappiness, the legacy of all those generations as they play out in ways that we can see and ways that we will never see across the patterns of our lives. . . true in a way that transcends mere recollection . . . [S]he arrives at an almost perfect balance, producing a survivor's story, a portrait of suicide from the outside, one that finds clarity in its inability to be clarified.
—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Joan Wickersham's deeply moving memoir seeks to comprehend the incomprehensible . . . What propels every intensely crafted page of this book is Wickersham's relentless drive to comprehend her father's suicide . . . Wickersham has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself, and has emerged with a powerful, gripping story.
––Chuck Leddy, Boston Globe
I read The Suicide Index with a rapacity bordering on need, with tears in my chest and in my eyes. Occasionally I had to put it down and leave the room. More often, I devoured it. The book is . . . the measured, elegant, gripping work of a professional writer who has set her powers of observation to work on her own family — her parents and grandparents, her uncle, her sister, her husband, her son — and on herself.
—Laura Collins-Hughes, New York Sun
In this harrowing, beautifully written memoir, Joan Wickersham tries to understand the forces that drove her father to take his own life. Part detective story, part anguished examination of a family, The Suicide Index traces the myriad repercussions suicide has not only on the future but also on the past. A powerful, important book.
—Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life
[A] daughter's piercing and profoundly considered response to [her father’s] death. She constructs her book like a series of index cards, with chapter headings that mimic those on outlines. It becomes a brilliant choice, allowing Wickersham to flip and sort through 15 years of what William Maxwell observed when he wrote, “The suicide doesn't go alone, he takes everybody with him.” . . . Against the violent transgression of suicide, Wickersham has crafted a consummately subtle book. . . . In its discipline and art, The Suicide Index has the feel of a classic.
– Karen Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer
She writes beautifully. . . about the amount of sheer space a suicide takes in the lives of surviving family members, from the moment of death through the weeks, months and years afterward. . . . Bleak, strong and fiercely honest.
––Reeve Lindbergh, Washington Post
In spare prose, Wickersham has produced an artful and vivid memoir. . .
capacious enough for both intimate detail and general information; cold data and lyric moments; for mystery and for consolation. The elementary facts—when, where, and how—are straightforward, even simple . . .but her pursuit of “why” leads Wickersham and her reader into the ‘unanswerable questions and unresolvable paradoxes’ that give her book classic qualities.
—Publishers Weekly
The Suicide Index is just astonishing. Having endured the suicide of a close family member, I opened this book with dread and longing: fearful of revisiting so much pain yet keenly wanting, as I always will, to understand “why.” No one can ever fully answer the devastating question that suicide remains for those left behind, yet here, in Joan Wickersham's exquisitely straightforward story, I found surprising consolation. It is a love story, a mystery, a quiet tragedy, a dark comedy, and a profoundly absorbing modern family saga. It will stay with me for a very long time.
—Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Whole World Over
What makes the narrative so compelling is not only Wickersham's gift for making her memories sing as though they were our own, but also how she presents herself as a willful seeker, open to any and all incarnations of truth . . . (A) very moving memoir.
—Elle
This book is beautifully written and haunts the reader long after it’s closed.
—Library Journal](welcome_files/shapeimage_2.png)
