The Suicide Index

Description

A daughter’s moving account of her father’s suicide and its impact on her surviving family members–“beautiful…bleak, strong, and fiercely honest” (The Washington Post) One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. How could the man she knew and loved have killed himself? Unless maybe she never really knew her father at all? 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, plus each encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors, exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and a deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter’s anguished, loving elegy to her father that no reader will soon forget.
Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Joan Wickersham
Published: 06/23/2009
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780156033800
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 0.70″ H x 7.90″ L x 5.20″ W

About the Author
Wickersham, Joan: – Joan Wickersham is the author of four books, including The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has published essays and reviews in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune, and she has contributed on-air essays to National Public Radio. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.