currently reading: Calypso by David Sedaris
books bought:
Calypso by David Sedaris
There There by Tommy Orange
Lost in the Fun Zone by Leif Goldberg
Retreat by Jaakko Pallasvuo (actually I don't remember exactly when I paid for these last two, as I ordered them from 2dcloud's kickstarter a while back, but they just got here today so they're on the list now)
books received:
none (which is fine, I guess)
books finished:
There There by Tommy Orange
Hey you,
All right, so I'm reading the new David Sedaris book, so I'm basic, whatever. After the election I didn't go online for a week and I read all of his books, and now I feel I owe him some kind of debt of loyalty. Also, fuck you, I like his writing and he makes me laugh and I don't have to justify myself, anyway!
There's a definite darkness in these new essays that I don't remember being there before. He writes more about his dead mom than he did in his earlier books, and he also writes about his sister, Tiffany, who killed herself in 2013. I had read one of the essays about Tiffany – "Now We Are Five" – before, but of course it was different to read it this week.
I mentioned in an earlier one of these missives that I always have a bright pink bag in rotation, and that there have been several iterations of the bright pink bag, but I didn't say that they've always been Kate Spade bags.
The New York Times ran a piece earlier this week with the headline "As the Public Mourns Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, These Books May Shed Some Light on Their Experiences." It's an understandably cautious way of saying, "Hey, here are some books about suicide." I've been feeling weird about the article since I saw it, because, as one of my coworkers once said to me, "Don't use tragedy to sell books," but on the other hand I really don't think the Times is trying to sell books with this one – if they're guilty of anything it's a different sort of capitalism, it's that maybe this article was written out of a desire to get clicks, to capitalize on the news. Or maybe they really were trying to build empathy. But mostly I feel: they should have done better in choosing the books.
The first one they chose was Al Alvarez's The Savage God, and I think if the list had more than three books on it there would have been a place for Alvarez. Or: the book would belong on the list if the headline didn't say what it did, if it was just called "Books Bout Suicide." So much of The Savage God is grounded in literary theory and conjecture – I didn't feel it had a lot of light to shed, frankly, or maybe it did when it was first published in 1972 but not so much now. The first part of the book is interesting as a sort of memoir of Sylvia Plath; Alvarez theorizes that she didn't really mean to kill herself, and part of me feels like he is denying her her agency, and another part of me feels like the evidence he presented was really very convincing, and the biggest part of me says, What does it matter now?
If we're just looking for a solid nonfiction book on suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast should have been on the list instead. It does all the right things, combines research and case studies and personal experience and history and context. Although even this one is becoming more and more out of date – I think it came out in 1999. TheTimes also could've put Suicide by Émile Durkheim on the list, which, yes, was originally published in 1897, but it's still the foundation for so much of the literature in suicide today.
The Times put a work of fiction on the list, too, All My Puny Sorrows by Mirriam Toews, which: okay. I read it and I liked it just fine; there's a lot the book does well but I didn't feel its portrayal of suicide was particularly groundbreaking or representative. I think Ned Vizzini's YA kinda-classic It's Kind of a Funny Story would've been a better pick, gives you a more solid perspective of what it is like to be in those shoes, to feel like you are among the condemned. (I remember feeling as if Ned Vizzini's suicide was one of the greatest betrayals of my life.)
(Actually I still feel that way.)
Some other books to consider reading: Karen Green's Bough Down is lyrical and disjointed and breaks my heart every time. Suicide by Édouard Levé is haunting and disjointed in a different sort of way, and both books force you into a place where everything is a little bit unsteady, where you don't know what's real and what's not – I think that's true to life, I think that's part of their strength. Adam Cayton-Holland has a book coming out in August called Tragedy + Time, and it's about his little sister's suicide, and what I loved about the book was that it wasn't afraid to be very funny while it devastated me. One of the things that struck me about it was Cayton Holland's openness about how much he does not want platitudes and he doesn't know what to do when people in a similar situation reach out to him. He doesn't want to be a part of the community, I guess, and who could blame him?
I will say this – theTimes got one of the books on the list right, Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which has some of the most thoughtful writing on suicide I've come across. Solomon writes about watching his mother die by suicide after a battle with cancer, he writes about his suicidal ideation, he talks with people who survived suicide attempts and the families of people who didn't, he interviews doctors and researchers across the globe. When I say thoughtful I think I meannuanced. (Why don't I just say that, then?) I haven't come across any other writing on suicide that is so nuanced, that is so unafraid of the gray areas. He ends the chapter titled "Suicide" like this:
I would say of suicide not that it is always a tragedy for the person who dies, but that it always comes too soon and too suddenly for those left behind. Those who condemn the right to die are committing a grave disservice. We all want more control over life than we have, and dictating the terms of other people's lives makes us feel safe. That is no reason to forbid people their most primitive freedom. Nonetheless, I believe that those who, in supporting the right to die, distinguish some suicides absolutely from others are telling a lie to accomplish a political objective. It is up to each man to set limits on his own tortures. Fortunately, the limits most people set are quite high... Suicidality may be a symptom of depression; it is also a mitigating factor. The thought of suicide makes it possible to get through depression. I expect that I'll go on living so long as I can give or receive anything better than pain, but I do not promise that I will never kill myself. Nothing horrifies me more than the thought that I might at some stage lose the capacity for suicide.
The number for the suicide prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255, and I don't know if you knew this but you can respond to this email, although I'm not a professional, I'm just a lil bookseller without the good sense to keep her thoughts to herself.
Your friend,
Smalls