The Suicide Index

Categories: Award Winners , Staff Picks , Nonfiction

Every once in awhile, a book comes along when you need it most.  For me, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death In Order was that book.

A 2008 National Book Award finalist, author Joan Wickersham poetically tries to make sense of the death of her beloved father by a self-inflicted gunshot wound on a cold February day in 1991.  Using the index format found in the back of nonfiction books as chapter titles (Suicide: act of, Suicide: anger about, Suicide: attitude toward), Wickersham attempts to impose order on an intensely chaotic, personal experience. 

Julia Glass, author of The Whole World Over, says it best:

“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.”