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Maybe someday
27
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
17/100Critics
37/100Scholars
Author:
Clancy Martin
Publisher:
Pantheon
Date:
March 28, 2023
In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues.
What The Reviewers Say
Messy, confessional but ultimately beneficent.
The book is a blend of genres: part memoir, part self-help, part philosophical and literary exploration. I would even suggest it is part novel. All of this makes the book odd, as it constantly doubles back on itself to interrogate the very things that it is doing and saying. It is filled with trigger warnings, caveats, apologies and statements of mistrust.
Writing about others, Martin is insightful and kind. What appears much more difficult is finding a way to write with sympathy for himself. He returns again and again to material that he describes as humiliating or shameful, sources of his self-loathing, miseries, and guilt. He tries to contextualize these experiences through the literature of suicide.
Unique.
