The Suicide Index (Putting My Father's Death in Order)

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.