Clancy Martin - How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

ALSO BY CLANCY MARTIN

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Bad Sex

Scalper

How to Sell

Copyright 2023 by Clancy Martin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from Suicide Note from The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton. Copyright 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr., executors of the will of Anne Sexton. Foreword copyright 1981 by Maxine Kumin. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Harvard University Press: Excerpt from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Portions of this work originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: Chapters 4 and 5 in Harpers Magazine; Chapter 8 and a portion of Chapters 1 and 10 in Highline/The Huffington Post and in Epic; and Chapter 9 in The Believer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Martin, Clancy W., author.

Title: How not to kill yourself : a portrait of the suicidal mind / Clancy Martin.

Description: New York : Pantheon Books, 2023. Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022036118 (print). LCCN 2022036119 (ebook). ISBN 9780593317051 (hardcover). ISBN 9780593317068 (ebook).

Subjects: LCSH: SuicidePsychological aspects. SuicidePrevention.

Classification: LCC HV6545 .M275 2023 (print) | LCC HV6545 (ebook) | DDC 362.28dc23/eng/20220805

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036118

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022036119

Ebook ISBN9780593317068

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover photographs by Kent Rogowski

Cover design by Kelly Blair

ep_prh_6.1_142996262_c0_r0

For Amie and my children

Contents

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A Note to the Reader

I wrote this book especially for the people like memany of whom I have come to know over the past thirty yearswho have attempted suicide and failed, and who still struggle with the desire to kill themselves. I also hope to speak to people who have suicidal thoughts or may be considering an attempt, and to the many people whose lives have been drastically changed because of the self-inflicted death of a loved one. I hope that anyone who in some way orbits the dark sun of suicide may be helped, a bit, by reading about my own attempts, my failures and successes, to live with that gravitational pull.

That said, if youre in serious crisis right now, if youre reading this and thinking of doing it, please turn to Appendix I, Tools for Crisis, where I list some resources that can immediately help. If youre having a bad time but feel like you can read something a bit longer, please page through the interviews in Appendix II, In Case of Emergency: Interviews on Staying Alive, and perhaps also Chapter 11, A Good Death? where I discuss some of my own strategies for surviving rough times. Naturally, my aspiration is that you will read the whole book and that it will encourage you to keep on going, even when things feel hopeless.

Preface

The last time I tried to kill myself was in my basement with a dog leash. As usual, I didnt write a note. I carried down a green leather and wood chair from my office while my dog watched from the stairs. Shes afraid of the basement. I took the heavy blue canvas leash, looped it over a beam, made a noose by snaking the leash through the handle, latched it, and checked it for strength. I stood on the green chair and put the noose around my neck. Then I kicked the chair away like the gentle old institutionalized suicide Brooks Hatlen does toward the end of The Shawshank Redemption. I hung there, kicking. But I wasnt dying, I was just in terrible pain. Hanging yourself really hurts. I had forgotten that, though Id tried it before, because Id recently spent some time reading about people hanging themselves, and it sounded so easy. Other people manage to do it from a doorknob sitting down. I started to panic, I resisted the panic, I panicked some more, and in a moment that I cant exactly recall, I lifted myself up and got out of the leash. I dropped to the floor and lay there on the dusty concrete for a while. I still havent moved that chair back upstairs. Its too spooky, and I dont want it in our house.

Later that day I spoke to my wife on the phoneshe was away on a tripand she asked me what was wrong with my voice.

I have a sore throat.

Make yourself some ginger and honey tea, she said. It sounds like youre coming down with something.

Uh-huh, I said.

My throat hurt for another week, and several of my students asked me what I had done to my neck. The bruising was flagrant. I told them Oh, it looks worse than it is, and avoided the question.

I probably could have told them the truth. But its one thing to write about suicide and your suicide attempts and have those readily available to your students on the internetstudents do google their professorsand quite another to look a student in the eye, with the black and blue evidence on display, and say, Oh, I tried to hang myself a couple of days ago. Even if there were no professional consequences (and I suspect there may have been), Id worry about laying that kind of weight on the minds of young people, and also about the possibility that it might encourage one of them who might already be suffering from depression or having suicidal thoughts to make a bad choice.

Ive lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and Im glad my suicides failed. Ive never once thought, If only Id successfully killed myself, I would have been spared all this living Ive done. And yet when Im feeling like my life has been a complete waste, my first thought is Okay then, go kill yourself now. Or rather, I tend to think along very concrete lines, such as Id better just hang myself, because I dont have any poison, and if I order some, Ill have lost my nerve by the time it gets here. And its important that I do this right now, while my thinking is clear. (Which shows you how confused I actually am.) In that moment when I am so convinced that killing myself is the right thing to do, I am as certain that I am finally admitting the truth to myself as one feels one knows, irrefutably, when very angry: now, at last, I can finally say what I actually always wanted and needed to say. Later, when calm, its clear this angry certainty did not necessarily reflect the truth at all.

Of course, Im not always struggling with suicidal thoughts. As I write this sentence in the winter of 2022, for example, I dont want to take my own life, and Im grateful that Im here. But in a way, gratitude misses the point. You can be grateful for something and still not be up to the task.

And if and when the thought should return Yes, do it, kill yourself, or simply, Come on now, its time, youre too tired, end it all, get it over with Ill still be glad that I was previously unsuccessful, because all those failed attempts predate good things that have happened since then, including most important, the births of my children.