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In History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life, Jill Bialosky creates a narrative perspective that is complex and capacious enough to consider the multigenerational factors that contribute to suicide as well as the manifold consequences of this climactic act. Drawing from literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, Bialosky considers suicide from many angles, creating a virtual tour de force—by far the most comprehensive and engaging depiction of a suicide and its myriad ripple effects that I have come across in a single book. Not only does Bialosky help us understand her sister's suicidal state of mind, she takes us through her own journey of trying to sort out and come to terms with what happened.
Bialosky organizes the book in a series of discrete narratives that form an interconnected spiral, feeding into one another and deepening our comprehension as we move forward and backward through the different parts. Initially, she lays out the circumstances of her sister's suicide, circumstances that make deeper emotional sense as we immerse ourselves in Bialosky's own childhood, and the broader circumstances that led to her sister's birth. Bialosky continuously revisits the same territory, laying out different parts of the story as she moves along, but by the time we have gotten through all the sections, we know so much more than we did when we began because aspects of her life history interweave in a
way that deepens our understanding. The whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts.
The beauty of this book is that it is an in-depth, experience-near narrative. Readers will learn more about the multifaceted, chilling reality of living with a death by suicide—and they will learn what it feels like to inhabit that reality. Bialosky writes, “[b]efore Kim ended her life, I thought, like most people, that someone who would take his or her own life was somehow different from the rest of us. I was wrong” (p. x). To me, this reads like a corollary to Harry Stack Su