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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Making sense of suicide: can fiction help?

9/9/2015

14 Comments

 
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As I mentioned on my recent post on Random Musings, I sometimes coordinate my blog posts with one of the international commemorative days dotted through the calendar. But, with a blog about reading and writing, seasoned with psychology, I do wonder about the legitimacy of made-up stories in amongst the true accounts of heroic attempts to tackle the issue of the day. Yet I’m convinced fiction has its place. By providing a safe space in which we can explore attitudes and motivations from which we might shy away in real life, fiction can help make sense of potentially overwhelming aspects of the human condition. So, for my first post for World Suicide Prevention Day, I’m exploring the portrayal of suicide in fiction. But if you’re looking for the facts and figures on suicide, or more direct strategies of prevention, click on the image for more information. While you’ll find a long list of fictional suicides on Wikipedia, I’m limiting myself to novels I’ve reviewed.
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A cursory look through the list on my reading and reviews page, reminds me that our notions of what constitutes suicidal behaviour are not always crystal clear. For example, we encounter reckless and life-denying pursuits in both The Surfacing and The Anchoress but, because they’re motivated more by virtue than despair, they are not regarded as suicide even though death is the inevitable outcome. On the other hand, the untimely death of a teenager in Everything I Never Told You looks like suicide, and the account of events leading up to the death suggests that Lydia has sufficient motivation, but in the absence of a note, her family is left with the torment of not knowing.

There’s a similar ambiguity in The Analyst, in which a New York psychoanalyst is frustrated when the police dismiss the death of one of his patients as suicide when he is convinced it’s murder, on the grounds that the man enjoyed his misery too much, and had too little insight into his problems, to give in to despair. In Border Crossing, Tom’s undoing stems from his assumption that the young man he sees cramming a handful of pills into his mouth and diving into the river needs to be rescued. But it’s in this series on fictional therapists that we find the most explicit attempt to articulate what suicide actually is.

The relationship between a suicidal woman and her therapist portrayed in The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers provides redemption for both of them, although initially Dr McBride feels overwhelmed by her despair. Chatting with his good friend and mentor, he poses the question of what people are “up to, really, when they seriously try to kill themselves” (p73). There follows a (slightly preachy) deposition on suicide as “a short cut to one of the only certainties … a fast-track method of transportation from one realm to another”, taking in Socrates’ sacrifice of his life on a principle and the irony of his paying (p74)

his last respects to a healer at the point when there was about to be nothing of him left to heal. I reckon he was saying, life is a sickness and death is a welcome recovery from it. Remember, there’s no cure for being alive!

The latter becomes something of a motto for Dr McBride, that helps him understand his own grief and thereby that of his patient. Though it’s slightly at odds with mental health orthodoxy, sometimes we need to accept our self-destructive impulses in order to stay alive.

My own novel, Sugar and Snails, was partly inspired by a newspaper report of a woman who had died of anorexia nervosa without any of her friends or family being aware of her condition (a slow form of suicide perhaps) and features three types of suicidal behaviours. First, there are the role-play games Diana remembers from her childhood with best-friend Geraldine, stemming from the death-cults of ancient Egypt and the Catholic Church and the most romanticised suicides of all time, Romeo and Juliet. In middle age, Diana hasn’t given much thought to this until the request for a bedtime story about “when you were a little girl” gives a seven-year-old nightmares. Diana is perplexed (p31-32):

Poor little Ellie, dreaming herself sealed up in a coffin with only a furry orange rabbit and a liberated tooth for company. The guilt burned in my throat, but I still couldn’t understand how my story had engendered such a reaction. It wasn’t logical for something that had given two children hours of pleasure to traumatise another little girl a generation later… Perhaps, like tug-of-war and hopscotch, those games from the Sixties would be unfathomable to any twenty-first-century child. Or perhaps it had more to do with me and Geraldine, the kind of kids we were, importing our peculiar pathologies into our play. The excitement of ransacking the dressing-box, the jumble-sale smell of old clothes. Watching our reflections in the wardrobe mirror as we morphed into the star-crossed lovers: a purple bolero and a feathered hat for Romeo, a balding velvet dress and necklace of rosary beads for Juliet.

But Diana takes the story literally, manifest in repeated acts of self-harm, attacks on her own body triggered by the despair of not being the person she longs to be. Even so, like Juliet, she isn’t seeking obliteration (p189):

Even as a kid, I never wanted to end it. Even at eleven when I took my mother’s Valium and thought no one would find me, I only wanted a break. At fourteen … I didn’t swallow paracetamol to kill myself. I took it because the contradictions were too much to bear.

I took it because I believed in all those stories of redemption. I thought Jesus really did rise from the dead. I thought Juliet would get up and walk, hand-in-hand with Romeo, out of the Capulet mausoleum. I thought that by taking it to the limit I’d be transformed into another person, reincarnated as someone I could live with.

But Diana isn’t the only one in the family obsessed by suicide. Leonard, her father, is searching for meaning in his attendance at the funeral for one of his POW comrades on the day his middle child was born (p262-3):

“At first I thought they were acting funny because they were southerners. They gave me a right earful. I didn’t even notice nobody mentioned how he died. I had … his sister trying to quiz me about the prison camp, as if she hadn’t the manners to know there’s stuff goes off that’s better forgotten. And then his ma, taking me by the arm to the shed in the garden. This is where I found him, she said.” … My dad turned round, fixing his gaze on a spot on the wall just past my left shoulder: “It was a criminal offence, back then, you see. The suicide act didn’t come in till a couple of years after.”

I shivered: “Suicide?”

“Could’ve been thrown in the slammer for it. That’s why they kept it hush-hush.”

My laughter was half mocking, half hysterical: “They couldn’t send a dead man to prison.”

“Them as didn’t succeed got tried and sent there. And their families sometimes, for aiding and abetting.”

Fortunately, while assisting suicide is still illegal (hence the controversy over the right to die), attitudes to someone attempting suicide have become more sympathetic. But I wonder if we’ve still got a long way to go before we can understand its myriad forms.

Do you think fiction can help combat the stigma of suicide? What have you read that addresses the subject in a suitably sensitive manner?


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
14 Comments
Jeanne Lombardo link
10/9/2015 03:02:07 am

Very thought-provoking Anne. I don't often stop by. Once I start blog hopping half my day is gone. But when I do I always come away satisfied and eager to delve into your topic for more. Suicide is a tough one. I have never known anyone personally who has ushered him/herself out of the world, but have witnessed the pain of a daughter and sibling of those who have. Perhaps we all imagine what it might be like at some point to take ourselves out, even engage in the selection game of how we might do it. But to get to your question, yes I think fiction is an excellent vehicle for shedding light on the topic and removing some of its stigma. I wish I could say I have read such a novel or story to back up my opinion, but there are some stories I shy away from (the murder of a child is another one.--have never been able to read Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones for that reason.) But now I am intrigued. Will post again if something comes to mind that I have indeed read!

Reply
Annecdotist
11/9/2015 01:00:28 pm

Blogs do indeed eat time, Jeanne, so thanks for dropping by and sharing your views.
As to The Lovely Bones, obviously it's sad because of the death of the child, but it's not too gruesome IMO – although I am drawn to some quite dark topics.

Reply
Derbhile Graham link
10/9/2015 08:58:20 am

I think fiction offers us a safe way to explore dark feelings and to process our own experience. We have the comfort of knowing the story isn't true, but equally we have the comfort of feeling that someone understands the dark feelings that reside within us all.

Reply
Annecdotist
11/9/2015 01:02:17 pm

Yes, that feeling that someone understands us when we connect emotionally with the story is really important. Thanks for sharing, Derbhile.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
10/9/2015 12:35:58 pm

You are delving into deep dark waters here, Anne, but with just reason. Suicide is very sad. I haven't been personally touched but some of my closest friends have. A brother of one "fell" from a building. He left no note and they had thought he was beginning to cope. It was a difficult time for the family and they found it almost impossible to accept that he hadn't been pushed. I don't know if they have still. The teenage daughter of another did her best to leave this realm. Fortunately they got to her in time and she is now a happy and successful adult planning a wedding early next year. But as her mum says, the worry never leaves. How can you be sure they are okay. Celebrating "Are you OK?" today, is a great way of making connections, of really asking, rather than simply tossing out a careless remark of social politeness.
At the moment I can think of only one book when suicide is mentioned and that is Stephen King's "IT". I bought it for my son's thirteenth birthday and decided to read a bit of it first. When I came across the gruesome suicide scene on about page 3, I put it away on the top shelf of my cupboard where it stayed for years and years (still could be there for all I know). Yes, I censored it. I can't think of anything else I censored. I thought it was one thing for him to choose it from the library or bookstore shelf, it was another for me to give it to him. If he had chosen for himself I would not have forbidden him to read it, but there was no way I was giving it to him. Or reading it myself! I'm not into horror!
I'm pleased Diana wasn't successful in her attempts. We would have missed out on a wonderful story!
I am a great believer in fiction as a way of "experiencing" and learning to understand and possibly deal with situations that may be rather confronting or destabilising in "real" life.
Thanks for sharing your insights here.

Reply
Annecdotist
11/9/2015 01:06:54 pm

Thank you, Norah for your wonderfully thoughtful comment. I think I'd be with you regarding that book for your son – even if it's acknowledged that you have different tastes there is some element of endorsement if you buy a book for someone. I wonder if he's ever read it now he's grown-up?

Reply
Norah Colvin link
21/9/2015 12:04:42 pm

I think he has. He is (was) a Stephen King fan. "They all" make fun of me for censoring!

Annecdotist
21/9/2015 05:21:44 pm

Better to be made fun of than fail to protect!

Charli Mills
10/9/2015 05:54:40 pm

I hadn't thought of suicide in terms of many forms, and see, already you have used fiction to further a new aspect of awareness. Like you, I believe fiction has a vital role when it comes to exploring and expressing difficult situations and attitudes. Fiction can help readers imagine a scenario outside their realm of experience or understanding and it can also elicit compassion for a character who suffers from self-harm.

Reply
Annecdotist
11/9/2015 01:09:46 pm

Oh, thanks for that, Charli – I wasn't sure if those different forms were really down to my lack of understanding of the definition – but you've turned my confusion on its head!

Reply
geoff link
10/9/2015 11:19:19 pm

A post with a lot to think about this. My first book has at its centre a death that might be a gruesome accident but has the hallmarks of suicide. It is almost too much for the MP to think it might be the latter and he seeks to find someone to blame for it if it is. At the time I wrote it I'd not come across anyone I knew who'd committed suicide. But a few years after the lovely man who helped in our garden killed himself (he had regular bad bouts of depression but wasn't at the time). It was so unexpected, so shattering I haven't looked at the book since. Somehow it seems cheap to develop an entertainment off the back of it. I know that is silly and one day I will go back but first I have to believe it is justified.

Reply
Annecdotist
11/9/2015 01:14:16 pm

I think it's quite common for suicide to occur when the person is actually feeling a bit better, as it is then that they have the energy to act on their feelings. But that does make it extra shocking for those left behind.
I'm sure your book will be better for working through those reservations, and I do think we need to be free to write about anything at all. But your comment does make me think now how strange it is that murder mysteries are so popular when in real life it's so dreadful.

Reply
Jeanne Lombardo link
11/9/2015 06:04:12 pm

Had to reassess my earlier comment after reading the others posted here (and accidentally unsubscribed to further comments and didn't want to miss any). Geoff's comment about it being cheap to develop entertainment off the back of some disastrous event particularly struck me. I realize when reading the paper I have a knee-jerk reaction to click on stories of murders and suicides and horrific disasters. I gobble up the details even as I cringe. I don't think it is for cheap entertainment, though I may be kidding myself. I want to know what it is about human nature that compels people to commit such crimes, or leads them to unimaginable ends. So in that respect, when authors do tackle the theme of suicide (or murder, etc.) as long as it is done with a more enlightening purpose and with sensitivity, then it adds to human understanding and allows readers to share an experience. Perhaps it builds compassion. Of course, many books are simply the equivalent of cheap, exploitative slasher films. I don't go there.

Annecdotist
16/9/2015 10:21:36 pm

I agree, part of why we write about horrible things is to process them and understand. Even if we've not experienced something like it directly ourselves it might still resonate for us at some level.
I've been so obsessed with my novel, I actually forgot when I wrote this post that I do have a short story about a suicide – in fact didn't remember until I was reading it for a short story journal launch on Friday!




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