Living with "Suicide"

I'm late in reading Joan Wickersham's "The Suicide Index," her memoir of coming to terms with her father's suicide in 1991. A finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, it has just come out in paperback. What a powerful book -- with a structure that is so perfect for the story it tells.

I heard Joan speak at Grub Street's conference back in April about the process of writing the book. In 1995, she started writing a novel about her father's suicide. It didn't work. On the first day of her residency at the MacDowell Colony up in N.H., she threw out 330 pages of her 400-page manuscript. It was there that she came up with the idea of organizing the book like an index. It may sound odd; it's certainly unconventional. But it works. Boy, does it work.