Mixed feelings. The book starts out very well, so the first 3rd is great. However, a lot of the other parts are weak. Some of the chapters were written for different publications and do not seem to flow well with the book as a hole.
The only other worthwhile part was when the author starts connecting with other suicide victims.
Still, this is probably the best non-fiction book I have ever read. ( )

This is an extraordinary book, and one that is hard to sum up. The foundational events around which the memoir is built are easy to identify. One morning Joan Wickersham's father wakes up, gets dressed, makes his breakfast, makes decaf for himself and real coffee for his wife which he leaves at her bedside, brings in the paper, walks up to his study and sticks a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. No note and no real warning signs (though in hindsight there were many things that might be interpreted that way.) That act then came to define Wickersham's life, her husband's and to some extent her children's lives, her mother's and sister's lives, and the lives of everyone around them. People talk about suicide these days like it is a choice every person can make for themselves and there is so fallout. For those of us who are left behind (my loss to suicide was an ex-boyfriend of many years) we know this to be untrue. Wickersham says something in the book about the term "commit suicide" which resonated now that there is a movement afoot to erase that term from language and replace it with "died by suicide." She said that people "commit suicide" against those they leave behind, that even if it is not an act of aggression it is an act of reckless indifference to the impact on those left in the rubble, those who realize they never really knew a person who was one of the most important people in their lives. (This is obviously not intended on my part to cover suicides attributable to chronic and/or terminal illness. Nobody is left to wonder about the reasons for the choice to take ones life in that case, to feel like everything that came before was a lie.)

This book is about being left in that rubble. It is about the dozen or so years following Wickersham's father's suicide, and her driving need to find answers, to put order and meaning around something so disorderly and unexplainable. The book is brutally honest, and throws into relief fractures in the "happy family" people might think they had, it tears down the lies we tell ourselves about our parents and it humanizes them, it digs into the ugly side of mother-daughter and spousal relationships, it does not shy away from vanity and self-centeredness and anger. This is it, this is what suicide leaves in its wake. This is clear-eyed, not at all sentimental or sensational, it is almost terse, and it is creative in its structure not for creativity's sake, but because the structure enhances the communicative heft of the story without defining how you, the reader, should feel. Brilliant. ( )

Structured according to index form (thus the title), THE SUICIDE INDEX delves into and catalogues the myriad complexities in a family of suicide, and between a father (who committed suicide) and daughter, and her urge to understand what has happened and how it's affected her and her family. It is a stunning structural feat, but one that is necessary for the trajectory of memoir—the history of his life and how she now regards it and their relationship, relying on memory, fictionalized accounting, vignettes of raw emotion, and a study of the mother-daughter relationship as well, and how the mother is coping. A compelling read, largely because of the narrator's search is so compelling, and we are so thoroughly engaged with her wisdom and observations.

Make what you will of the book's eponymous title gimmick, which organizes the book as if it were an index. This is a thorough, heartfelt meditation on the author's decision to take his own life and how it rippled through his family decades afterwards. The author's honest about her desire to identify the one element that explains her father's final act, and, but, after failing to do so, offers an admirably complete portrait of the man she knew, the one she didn't get to know, and his family history. Clear-eyed but still emotional, this book seems like both scholarly endeavor and an act of personal bravery. What emerges is a portrait of a talented, interesting man who'd survived a few rough circumstances but somehow failed to make it all fit together. By the time I finished the book, I felt that his suicide was, of course, important to his story, but didn't really define him. This, I think,is what the author might have wanted: she complains early on how suicide seems to obscure the people who commit it, changing them from merely "troubled" into people who become social untouchables.

Of course, "The Suicide Index" is a lot of verbiage about one subject, and this may try a lot of readers' patience. She talks about her own family and even about her relationship with her therapist at length. She's also -- consciously -- a product of Connecticut's comfortable bourgeois, and this aesthetic may not be to some readers' taste, especially since her mother, especially in the last sections of the book, comes off as a rather unsympathetic example of this group. Still, the book succeeds. While she includes a lot of thinking about the act of suicide that looks at the topic from a number of philosophical perspectives, she seems to sense that there's something eternally opaque about the act and her father's decision to go through with it. What she finds out about before and after her father's decision to end his own life is still plenty worthwhile, though. Recommended to those with a special interest in death, dying, and the mechanics of family trauma. ( )

A compelling look at suicide from the point of view of the grieving daughter as she shares the families thoughts and questions and blames. Her father shot himself and left no note. They troll through his recent past history, from his depression, his failed business, loans that had come due and family failings, each family member attempting to reconstruct the why's and wherefores and providing a look at the family dynamic years hence and how totally decimated a family can be when faced with such a tragedy. ( )