The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order by Joan Wickersham
After the author’s father completes suicide by gun, she uses the form of an index as a way to bring some order to all of the confusing and confounding aftershocks. How can she make sense of this particular final act?
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.