Recently Viewed Items
The Suicide Index (Putting My Father's Death in Order) (Hardcover)
- Author: Joan Wickersham
- Publisher: Harcourt
The following promotions apply
Prices, promotions, styles and availability may vary by store and online.
Availability:
In Stock
This item is available online, but is not available in stores.
Items purchased from the Music, Movies + Books category have a standard shipping fee of $2.99 per order. Items in your order purchased from other categories are subject to standard shipping charges.
Details
Description
At the age of 61, Joan Wickersham's father went into his office and shot himself in the head, ending his life, and sending everyone close to him into a long, painful, perhaps interminable descent into suffering and confusion. In her brutally direct, darkly compelling memoir, Wickersham seeks to comprehend her father's incomprehensible act, creating an index of his life in the hopes of grasping the mechanism--or perhaps malfunction--of his mind. Like a relentless detective obsessed with an unsolvable crime, Wickersham compiles evidence, proposes theories, follows leads, and culls her memory for the elusive scraps that might help her come to terms with her father's existence as a beaten, stoic, silent failure of a man. In doing so, she begins to also chart the myriad ways in which her own life, and the lives of her children, have been devastated by his death. Though from the beginning she knows her task is hopeless, Wickersham's intense quest is mesmerizing for the reader. One of the least sentimental and most emotionally and intellectually stimulating accounts of suicide, THE SUICIDE INDEX was nominated for the National Book Award in 2008.
Features
- Genre: Biography & Autobiography, Family & Relationships, Fiction & Literature Themes, Psychology
- Subgenre: Death + Grief + Bereavement, Depression, Family + Friendship, General, Parenting / Parent + Adult Child, Personal Memoirs, Suicide
- Date Published: August 04, 2008
- Release Date: August 04, 2008
- Publisher: Harcourt
- Author: Joan Wickersham
- Pages: 316
- Format: Hardcover
Additional Information
- DPCI: 248-04-6106
- ASIN: B002MKU1NW
- Catalog #: 11481043
- ISBN: 9780151014903
- Item can be gift wrapped.
Shipping & Policies
- You may return this item to any Target store.Opens in New Window
- Shipping & Delivery InformationOpens in New Window
- Estimated Ship Dimensions : 8.25 inches length x 5.5 inches width x 1.25 inches height
- Estimated Ship Weight: 1.08 pounds.
- We regret that this item cannot be shipped to PO Boxes.
Guest Reviews
There are no reviews for this item.
Have any thoughts you'd like to share?
Expert Reviews
Reviewer: Chuck Leddy, (Boston Globe)
"Joan Wickersham's deeply moving memoir...refuses to settle for sentimental, simplistic answers....What propels every intensely crafted page of this book is Wickersham's relentless drive to comprehend her father's suicide....[She] has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself, and has emerged with a powerful, gripping story."
Reviewer: Laura Miller, (Salon)
"Anyone prone to facile dismissals of the memoir as literary high art should be silenced by the perfection of Wickersham's prose and her ability to hold the facts and her feelings up to the light..."
