
What We Talk about When We Talk about Suicide: Books About Depression
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Robin Williams is dead. That’s still super-weird for me to even conceive of. I have been spending an inordinate amount of time sitting in my living room watching Robin Williams movies and thinking about how strange life is. This isn’t a post about Robin Williams; there are dozens of beautiful tributes across the internet, and we’ve even had one here at Book Riot. But this is a post about how we talk about suicide and mental health, and how literature is a really good place to start the conversation.
Swing Low: A Life by Miriam Toews is an imagined memoir written in the voice of Toews father, who took his own life in 1998. This is very much a book about a daughter searching for understanding and forgiveness for her father. Through this book, Toews describes the complicated interior life of her father who, respected in his Mennonite community and loved by his family, tries desperately to conceal the bipolar disorder that is causing his world to unravel. Through the book, Toews’ depiction of her father, up to and including his decision to end his life, is full of compassion and humanity. Toews would eventually also lose her sister to suicide, an experience exquisitely fictionalized in the forthcoming All My Puny Sorrows (if you’re in Canada, it’s already out — go forth and discover).
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by Al Alvarez is one of the classic books about this topic, and is part non-fiction sociological exploration, part meditation on Sylvia Plath, part memoir of his own attempted suicide, and part exploration of the role of suicide in the history of literature. It is a difficult book to read, both in form and content, but also incredibly rewarding for its empathetic and challenging interrogation of what Alvarez terms “the final human taboo.” If you’ve ever wanted to think more deeply about why you feel the way you do when you hear about a suicide, and if you’ve ever pondered the larger significance of our simultaneous fascination with and denunciation of the act of suicide, Alvarez’s study is the most complete and effective I’ve encountered.
Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me by Ellen Forney is a graphic memoir about Forney’s experiences with bipolar disorder. What I love about this inside look at mental illness, treatment, and recovery is that Forney is so much more than her mental state, even when that state is totalizing. This memoir is witty and unblinkingly honest, and Forney’s images will astound you with her ability to express her experiences of bleakness and loneliness in her sparse black-and-white style. This comic also very thoughtfully examines the idea that art and mental illness sometimes seem to be inextricably linked, and offers examples of some of the incredible contributions people suffering with depression have made to our creative lives.
I really believe that books about difficult experience can help us to empathize, and that through empathy we can build safe places to have these difficult conversations. In fact, I kind of think that kind of mind-opening and growth is the whole point of reading. And if someone reaches out to you in a time of despair, find the strength not to change the subject. Let’s figure out what we need to talk about when we talk about suicide.
Do you have a recommendation for a book about depression or suicide? Please share it in the comments below.