Jill Bialosky - History of a Suicide: My Sisters Unfinished Life

Eloquent, harrowing and wise, this memoir is brave and necessary. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Illuminating. USA TODAY

Tender, absorbing, and deeply moving.... Bialosky writes so gracefully and bravely that what youre left with in the end is an overwhelming sense of love. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY (Grade: A)

It is so nice to be happy. It always gives me a good feeling to see other people happy.... It is so easy to achieve.Kims journal entry, May 3, 1988

O n the night of April 15, 1990, Jill Bialoskys twenty-one-year-old sister, Kim, came home from a bar in downtown Cleveland. She argued with her boyfriend on the phone. Then she went into the garage, climbed into her mothers car, turned on the ignition, and fell asleep.

Those are the simple facts, but the act of suicide is anything but simple. In a remarkable work of literary nonfiction, Bialosky re-creates with unsparing honesty her sisters inner life, and in so doing, opens a window on the nature of suicide itselfespecially the impact on those who remain behind. Combining Kims diaries with family history and memoir, drawing on the works of doctors and psychologists as well as writers from Melville to Plath, History of a Suicide is a stunning and compassionate exploration of human frailty and strength that brings a crucial and all too rarely discussed subject out of the shadows.

JILL BIALOSKY is an acclaimed novelist, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Paris Review; and The Nation, among other publications. She lives in New York City. Visit her online at JillBialosky.com.

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Praise for History of a Suicide

Elegiac.... Affecting.... Bialoskys detective work becomes a form of mourning, and a means of getting past it.

The New Yorker

Bialoskys language is plain but enveloping.... Her hand is always skillful, as attentive to the rhythms of storytelling as to conveying emotion.

Time

Valiant and eloquent.... Bialoskys thoughtful book elucidates the complexity of suicide.

The Washington Post Book World

A profound and lyrical investigation.... Bialosky writes sensitively and beautifully.

New York

Moments of exquisite pain and surprising joy.

O, The Oprah Magazine (Top 10 Titles to Pick Up Now)

Poignant and resonant.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Brave and beautifully crafted.

The Daily Beast

Quietly piercing.

Library Journal

An extraordinarily valiant and resonant testimony to the healing powers of truth and empathy.

Booklist

A beautifully composed, deeply reflective work.

Publishers Weekly

Beautiful, immensely painful.... Heart-wrenching.

The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

Candid, questing... stirring.

Loorie Moore, New York Review of Books

Thorough and thoughtful.... A remembrance of a much-loved sister and her brief life and also an attempt to come to grips with long-held guilt.

Elle

Fresh and fundamental.... Essential reading, and not just for those struggling intimately with suicidal thoughts of their own or of an intimate, but also for bereavement groups, college students, health-care professionals, educators, guidance counselors, authors, parents, friends, and siblings.... It is also a book Id like to put into everyones hands.

Lisa Russ Spaar, The Chronicle of Higher Education

This is a book of many doors, and these doors open into our own stories of loss, of psychic pain, of seeking to understand, of sisterhood.

The East Hampton Star

Bialosky brings a wealth of psychological research to the subjector one of them, for History of a Suicide could just as easily be said to be the story of an American family and how its members have simultaneously clung to the loves they have found but never truly coped with the losses which life has inflicted upon them.

Diann Blakely, option-magazine.com

This is the kind of book that can teach usall of usabout what it means to be a thinking, feeling human being. A book, in other words, that will teach you how to live.

Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life

The plain language of Bialoskys title reflects this books quiet, intimate and profoundly understated art: a clear medium penetrating into the wounded and wounding mystery of her subject.

Robert Pinsky, former United States Poet Laureate

That rare book that is so articulate and stunningly close to the bone that one holds ones breath while reading it.

A. M. Homes, author of
This Book Will Save Your Life

Beautiful and incredibly brave.... Jill Bialosky has stared straight into the white hot heart of something very-nearly unspeakable.

Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion

An extraordinary book... [that] also serves as a practical road map to understanding why life can become unbearable for someone who seems extravagantly gifted.

Susan Cheever, author of Home Before Dark

Jill Bialosky is such a fearless and clear-eyed and compassionate writer that although we know from the start how the story she tells will turn out, we cannot stop reading.

George Howe Colt, author of November of the Soul

Like a match in the darkness, Jill Bialoskys stirring memoir sheds light on a fathomless mystery.

Melanie Thernstrom, author of The Pain Chronicles

Could things have been different? That is the inevitable, haunting question after a suicide. It can never be answered, only explored; and Jill Bialosky explores it with intelligence, integrity, a poets sensitivity, and a sisters enduring love.

Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index

Bialosky writes about despair with such elegance and perspicacity that the reader, paradoxically, is returned to hope, page after gleaming page.

Lauren Slater, author of Prozac Diary

History of a Suicide is an important contribution to literature. More than that, it is a gift overflowing with compassion.

Beth Kephart, National Book Award finalist and
author of You Are My Only on her blog

also by jill bialosky

Intruder

The Life Room

House under Snow

Subterranean

Wanting a Child
(co-edited with Helen Schulman)