Joan Wickersham’s memoir The Suicide Index (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story 4 likes Like A love story - your own, or anyone elses - is interior, hidden. The elementary facts when, where, and how are straightforward, even simple: 'My father got up early one morning, went into his study, and shot himself,' but her pursuit of 'why' leads Wickersham and her reader into the 'unanswerable questions unresolvable paradoxes' that give her book classic qualities. Joan Wickersham’s memoir The Suicide Index (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Suicide Index: Putting My Fathers Death in Order 8 likes Like She knows by now that grief is about endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back. As she follows her father's suicide chronologically from his death through a passage of 15 years, she doubles back through family history (her mother's, her father's, her husband's), telling the story under such subheads as 'anger about,' 'other people's stories about,' 'possible ways to talk to a child about,' 'romances of mother in years following.' Her search takes in matters as mundane as the police investigation, as academic as the nature of biography and as disquieting as the issue of suicide. Within the index of 'suicide,' she has found a form capacious enough for both intimate detail and general information cold data and lyric moments for mystery and for consolation.

Her previous book The Suicide Index was a National Book. In spare prose, Wickersham (The Paper Anniversary) has produced an artful and vivid memoir. Joan Wickersham finished a new book of fiction, The News from Spain, which was published in 2012.

The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham