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meme__theory's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
rose_peterson's review against another edition
4.0
THIS is how you write creative nonfiction. I'm not sure why this isn't getting more attention.
ecidnac's review against another edition
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
Moderate: Death of parent
Minor: Car accident and Miscarriage
darcieshultz's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
anuaggarwal's review against another edition
dark
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
i was gripped by the subject matter and beginning pages (due to the admittedly morbid pull that suicide has) but patterson fills this book with facts about regions and mining which broke the emotional appeal for me at times. i found myself skimming paragraphs about the history of these various small towns in kansas bc really i wanted to know the emotional aspects of suicide and she lost sight of it at times
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
surabhib's review against another edition
4.0
In this memoir, Juliet Patterson figures a constellation of facts and emotions about suicide. Her father died by suicide in December 2009, as had his own father and Patterson’s mother’s father in the years before. To wade through the grief of losing her father, Patterson imagines his last day as well as both of her grandfathers’; engages with the work of other thinkers on suicide; and travels several times from Minnesota to her parents’ hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas, to try to piece together her family history. It echoes the compassion of Miriam Toews’s Swing Low.
Of course there are no answers to why and how Patterson’s family has this “legacy of suicide,” but there are a lot of details and a lot of wisdom. Through archives and conversations, she comes to better understand not the deaths, but the lives of her father and grandfathers. Her father, a hardworking man with interests she never knew of; her paternal grandfather, a staunchly pro-union congressman; her maternal grandfather, a construction laborer turned oil profiteer. She braids the gaps and depressions in her family story with the literal sinkholes cropping up in Pittsburg, a result of environmental degradation caused by the mining industry, one of which threatens to swallow her grandmother’s house (It makes sense that Terry Tempest Williams, whose work also connects health and environment, blurbed this).
I loved what I found in this book and often wanted more—more about the environmental components of Pittsburg’s history, more about Patterson’s own life—a car accident days before her father’s death and the birth of her child figure into this narrative. It’s a fairly short memoir that covers a lot of ground. Yet I also get the sense that the book was difficult to write, with its crisp language, intense grief, and meticulous research, and so I am mostly grateful for the version that made it to publication, a version that makes me want to learn more, and want to be alive.
Of course there are no answers to why and how Patterson’s family has this “legacy of suicide,” but there are a lot of details and a lot of wisdom. Through archives and conversations, she comes to better understand not the deaths, but the lives of her father and grandfathers. Her father, a hardworking man with interests she never knew of; her paternal grandfather, a staunchly pro-union congressman; her maternal grandfather, a construction laborer turned oil profiteer. She braids the gaps and depressions in her family story with the literal sinkholes cropping up in Pittsburg, a result of environmental degradation caused by the mining industry, one of which threatens to swallow her grandmother’s house (It makes sense that Terry Tempest Williams, whose work also connects health and environment, blurbed this).
I loved what I found in this book and often wanted more—more about the environmental components of Pittsburg’s history, more about Patterson’s own life—a car accident days before her father’s death and the birth of her child figure into this narrative. It’s a fairly short memoir that covers a lot of ground. Yet I also get the sense that the book was difficult to write, with its crisp language, intense grief, and meticulous research, and so I am mostly grateful for the version that made it to publication, a version that makes me want to learn more, and want to be alive.
robynearhart's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.25