TBR: “The Suicide Index”
Like many, I have a stack of “To Be Read” (TBR) books on my nightstand.
And in my Kindle.
One of the goals of my retirement is to finally work my way through this pile, which would admittedly be a lot easier if I didn’t keep adding to it.
Oh well. Can’t stop, won’t stop.
One of the recent additions to my TBR pile, which has now in fact been read is Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (2008).
Wickersham’s account of her father’s suicide was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008, and I was drawn to it because 1) I read a lot of memoir, particularly about trauma and disability, and 2) because I’m a member of the American Society for Indexing and began studying to be a certified indexer a couple of years ago, so… the approach that this text took intrigued me.
As it’s title suggests, Wickersham organizes her chapters around the heading of “Suicide” and then alphabetically addresses a particular idea or issue that is a subheading of the overarching category.
So, for example, the first chapter is “Suicide: act of,” the second is “Suicide: anger about,” etc. etc.
As the text unfolds, Wickersham stretches the “indexing” idea quite a bit—for example, a later chapter is entitled “Suicide: life summarized in an attempt to illuminate,” which is pretty obviously not a subheading choice that would earn a passing grade on the Indexing exam.
The idea behind an index is that it offers a quick way to find a key concept in a given text. The longer the phrasing of a subheading, the more complicated it becomes to glean what the organizing idea behind it is.
And in that respect, Wickersham’s approach works well for her text, because the underlying message of her account of her father’s suicide is that it’s an act that can’t be “ordered” or made sense of.
What’s interesting—and this is something that other readers of Wickersham’s account noted as well—is the role that anger plays in her text.
As she acknowledges, she can’t be angry with her father (at least not at first), so much of the text focuses on her anger towards her mother.
As The Suicide Index unfolds, I felt that in many ways, it became as much “about” Wickersham’s mother as it was about her father.
Near the end of the text, Wickersham argues that “in real life suicide can’t be the backdrop, dwarfed by something else. It is the foreground: itself inevitably the thing that changes people’s lives. There is no other plot, and no resolution” (307).
Any “healing” from another’s act of suicide, Wickersham claims, is “like the slow absorption of a bruise” (307).
While I find that analogy compelling, I think much of the bruising in The Suicide Index seems to come from the mother figure, in part because there is so much emphasis on the father as a tragic figure—a victim of abuse (both physical and emotional), a failed businessman, a flawed but loving father.
All that said, I think the text is interesting for what it says about the ripple effects of a loved one’s suicide, and for the way that it tries to make sense of that act.
It’s not a light-hearted or “easy” read, obviously, but it’s an interesting and worthwhile one.
