Not infrequently, the gap between myself and Nao felt unbridgeable. I have spent the last twenty-three years contemplating these poetics, and by every measure they inform my own. (It demonstrated her potential intimacy with Samuel Beckett.) But I am not that poetic.” Like Virginia Woolf, my mom drowned herself with the help of pebbles and rocks. Placing pebbles and heavy rocks in her coat’s pockets was actually poetic. Just two pages in, Nao writes, “Unlike Virginia Woolf, my least favorite way to die is drowning. Familiar as I think I am with suicide, I did not expect such a challenge. It wasn’t long after my visit to the Bay that I read Vi Khi Nao’s Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche, which is Nao’s own account of living despite chronic suicidal ideation. While I’ve long considered myself an avid supporter of physician-assisted suicide, I was deeply challenged by the idea that terminal illness might not be the only reasonable justification for “death with dignity.” I told Beth that I supposed something about my mom’s suicide had hardened me-that I had, in fact, spent over two-thirds of my life cultivating an ethic and identity against suicide, perhaps to the point that I couldn’t even retain the plot of a novel that got up so close to its ugliness and still stayed kind toward it. I had not responded to the book’s empathy with any of my own-I had been annoyed. I remembered my nearly opposite experience reading this book which had dragged me, as if through slime, into the depths of someone’s relentless pursuit of death. Slowly, the book, and my experience of it, resurfaced. Beth pushed on, articulating her admiration of a story so tender toward someone who so seriously wanted to die. It took prodding to even remember the basic plot point of one of the sisters’ suicidality. It took digging through the recesses of my brain to remember that there was something about sisters. Time slumped I couldn’t remember a single thing.

I watched the water slip around my fingers and down the drain. I stood washing dishes at her little house in Oakland as she enthusiastically asked for my take. Beth was eager to hear what I thought of one of her favorite books, which I excitedly told her I’d finally read. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”Ī few months back, I visited the Bay Area for a friend’s birthday.

All my puny sorrows by miriam toews