THE SUICIDE INDEX: Putting My Father’s Death in Order
“When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You’re saying ‘I’m gone, and you can’t even be sure who it is that’s gone, because you never knew me.’”
On a winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Who was he? Why did he do it? And who was she now? Joan Wickersham has chosen the index format -- that most formal and objective of structures -- to impose order on this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. The form mirrors the mind’s attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Every bit of family history, every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of the 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
The Paper Anniversary
A novel
The story of a marriage that matures only when it may be too late.
“Wickersham is a thorough, honest, and quietly magnetic novelist . . . An astute and graceful drama about the status of compassion and love in a world rich in options and ambiguity.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“An astute contemporary parable generating a surprising amount of empathy for her characters . . . An appealing first novel.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Luminous prose reminiscent of Jane Austen . . . Her writing brims with tight, imagistic glimpses into contemporary relationships.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Joan Wickersham writes beautifully and with excruciating honesty about marriage, the sublime and the mundane of conjugal affection, and conjugal brutality. . . arriving again and again at truth with devastating accuracy. The Paper Anniversary is eloquent about the things we cannot explain, even . . . to those we love.”
—Ploughshares
“Wickersham fashions from the mercurial, transitory feelings and words and deeds of everyday life a story rich in subtle movement and emotion . . . A grown-up novel.”
—The Boston Phoenix
