Will I love The Suicide Index?

I love this book because it helped put my best friend’s suicide in perspective—provided some tools to understand his mind and motivations.

It allowed me to not feel so alone in dealing with his loss, giving me comfort and insight from someone who had already done a lot of processing around her own father’s suicide.

I couldn’t help but feel a certain kinship, which of course didn’t fill the hole in my heart, but did allow for a certain sense of peace and resolution.  

As contradictory as it sounds, when I read this book, the ache of grief that lives in my bones both intensified and diminished. Though the circumstances of our fathers’ deaths are not at all the same, somehow the specifics of Wickersham’s grief after her father’s death by suicide—the confusion, the obsessive need to make sense of it, the search to understand herself in its wake—all felt like indelible strands that bound her story to mine.

I love memoirs with structures that reflect the truth of a particular experience, and Wickersham’s brilliant, non-linear approach, in the form of an index that… show more.

This striking, intense, and beautifully meditative book offers a daughter struggling to understand her father in the wake of his suicide. It’s structured, yes, like an index, which does nothing to dilute its immense emotional power. There’s a lot of love and anger in this book, yet it’s told with extraordinary calm and exemplary clarity. Simply put, The Suicide Index is one of the most inventive, affecting memoirs I’ve ever read—a drop-everything-and-read-this-now book if there ever was one.