Sinkhole

May 9, 2022
After her father took his own life in 2009 at age 77, poet Patterson (Threnody) delved into her family’s legacy of suicide—the result is a stirring look at how history, environment, and cultural pressures all played a role. In an attempt to better understand her reticent father, Patterson left her home in Minneapolis for Pittsburg, Kans., her parents’ birthplace, to conjure the “three imagined final days,” of her father, his father, and her maternal grandfather, each of whom died by suicide and shared a “troubled relationship with masculinity.” As she sifts through police reports, she weaves in cogent insights from psychological studies—including one psychologist’s decoding of suicide notes to get to the “psychache” he believed was underpinning them—while unpacking a culture of repression that led her troubled forebears to weather their inner turmoil silently. Equally poignant are Patterson’s personal struggles—namely her reluctance around becoming a mother in the shadow of her family’s deep suffering: “Grief and parenthood had become intertwined for me. When my father died... the future was frightening.” While there’s catharsis delivered in the book’s final pages, it feels rushed in comparison to the evocative familial history that proceeds it. Even so, Patterson’s lyrical and discerning treatment of a global “psychological crisis” will keep readers transfixed.

August 1, 2022
A pensive memoir about mental illness, suicide, and the quest to uncover often hidden family secrets. Death by suicide may bring an end to a person's psychic and/or physical woes, but it reverberates among those left behind, sometimes in the form of shame or regret that one could not do more for the deceased, sometimes in the form of getting rid of every reminder that that person ever existed. In Patterson's sometimes-overwritten but forceful account, the suicide that set her on a yearslong quest for understanding was her father's. He died by hanging himself from a Minneapolis bridge on a frozen night. Her grandfather also ended his own life. "Even before my father's death," writes the author, "I felt keenly the psychological burden of such an inheritance." Since her father rarely spoke of her grandfather, Patterson had much to uncover, visiting his hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas, in a region where, in a profound metaphor, sinkholes abound. One in particular, near her grandparents' home, "was frighteningly deep. From where I stood, it looked as if the lawn had been punched with a massive awl, exposing the ground's secret interior." Both father and son, it seems, had been methodical in preparing their own deaths while staring into their own abysses. Once inside her grandmother's home, Patterson retrieved a wristwatch that, though its wearer was long dead, had been regularly cleaned ever since. This served as a sign that while the dead sometimes go unmentioned, they live on in things. Although her own mother removed almost all her father's possessions from their home, Patterson writes, she kept a few things, including the suicide note. Apart from the personal, the author weaves in results from her research in thanatology and suicide, including the provocative thought from psychologist Edwin Shneidman that "the person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor's emotional closet." A searching, often elegant meditation on loneliness, pain, and redemption.

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Starred review from August 1, 2022

Patterson (The Truant Lover) marvels at the pervasiveness of some of her family members', on both her paternal and maternal sides, dying by suicide. It fractures the perception that suicide is an isolated incident. The loss of her family's patriarchs dying in this way became a source of sorrow and shame for the author, who attempts to make sense of documented facts from police reports, obituaries, and firsthand accounts, along with the vast unknowns of her father's and grandfather's final days. Tying together environmental, political, and historical facts in her family tree, the author imagines what it means to take one's life and shares what it's like to be the one left behind. As fascinating as it is upsetting, Patterson has intersected the past and future, imagining the silent crisis happening among the men in her family, as well as the persistent fear of her own potential demise through self-harm, all while considering genetics, societal pressures, and prescribed antidepressants. The end result is an elegantly tragic work of research, history, and creative nonfiction that seeks answers, closure, and ultimate peace. VERDICT Recommend to readers navigating grief, loss, and the aftermath of suicide.--Alana R. Quarles

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