Look at suicide is both clinical and personal
Nancy Rappaport was 4 years old and the youngest of six children when her mother, also named Nancy, committed suicide.
More than four decades later Rappaport is now an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance, where she counsels suicidal youths.
Rappaport’s awkward new book “In Her Wake’’ is based on years of research and interviewing to understand the mother she barely remembers and learn what drove her to suicide.
The book has much to commend it: superb writing, conscientious reporting, the tone of a good mystery, but it veers into areas that don’t add up to a cohesive whole. Rappaport explores theories of suicide, presents case histories of suicidal patients, and takes us on detours involving her siblings and family friends.
Her parents, Nancy and Jerry Rappaport were well known in Boston, and Nancy’s suicide at age 34 was a big story. Jerry Rappaport had founded the New Boston Committee in the 1950s and developed the controversial Charles River Park project, which displaced thousands of working-class people from their West End neighborhood.
When the author’s mother ran, unsuccessfully, for the Boston School Committee, a young married man named Richard Sears became her campaign manager. They had an affair, after which she left her husband and children. When she tried to reconcile with her husband, he refused to take her back, prompting her first suicide attempt. She soon married another man, Alexander Stanley, and Jerry Rappaport married Barbara Sears, Richard’s ex-wife.
Meanwhile, Nancy fought for custody of her six children. On the day the court ruled against her, she took a massive dose of sleeping pills, went into a coma, and died five days later. She was pregnant at the time.
After the suicide “my father and my stepmother wrapped us in an uncomfortable silence and tried to carry on as if everything could be - would be - just fine.’’
Rappaport describes the toll on children of a parent’s suicide, noting that such young people are five times more likely than other children to kill themselves.
As the author struggles to understand the role of depression in her mother’s decision, she finds a journal entry in which her mother wrote, “All my life I’ve been like a peeled onion with all my nerve endings exposed.’’
Did depression drive her to suicide? What about the role of the sleeping pills a doctor had prescribed? Should she have been on a different medication, such as Valium? The author can only guess.
Perhaps the biggest clue is research suggesting that suicide requires “an underlying predisposition, a propensity for impulsiveness, without which the probability for suicide is small, no matter how bad things get.’’
In the end there are no certain answers. Readers looking for a tidy ending will be disappointed.
After years of frosty relations, the author has a long overdue talk with her aging father, who is irate about her plan to write this book, believing he will be portrayed as someone who drove his wife to suicide. Rappaport assures him of her love and gratitude for all he did for his kids.
She is left with questions about why her father would not reconcile with her mother, as well as her mother’s decision to kill herself. “But I have begun to see,’’ she writes, “how poisonous it can become when children are used as weapons in such a battle.’’
Rappaport ends her anguished account on this poignant note, “Losing our mother when we were so young cannot be sugarcoated. We needed her.’’
Bill Williams is a freelance writer in West Hartford and member of the National Book Critics Circle. 
