WORDS WITH… Clancy Martin

How Not To Kill Yourself offers a study of suicide that is philosophical— and deeply personal

BY TOM BEER

In his new book, How Not To Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind (Pantheon, March 28), Clancy Martin wastes no time getting to the dark heart of his subject. “The last time I tried to kill myself was in my basement with a dog leash,” he writes in the opening line of the preface. That tone—bluntly direct and deeply human—characterizes this remarkable volume, an attempt to bring discussion of suicide out of the shadows so that we can better understand the powerful impulse to kill oneself and how we might circumvent it.

A professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and Ashoka University in New Delhi, as well as a novelist (How To Sell), Martin writes with disarming candor about his own suicide attempts—he counts more than 10—as well as his difficult childhood and struggles with alcohol. He also brings lenses both philosophical and literary to bear on the subject, invoking Plato, Nietzsche, Anne Sexton, and David Foster Wallace. Above all, he writes, he seeks to “sincerely and accurately convey what it’s like to want to kill yourself, sometimes on a daily basis, yet to go on living, and to show my own particular reasons for doing so.”

In a starred review, Kirkus called How Not To Kill Yourself “disquieting, deeply felt, eye-opening, and revelatory.” It’s not an easy book to read, but it’s an urgently important one—especially for those contemplating suicide and their loved ones. We spoke with Martin, 55, by Zoom from his home in Kansas City; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This must have been a difficult book to write. How did it come about?

The impetus for the book was an article that I wrote for Epic magazine. An editor got in touch with me about writing a nonfiction piece. I said, “One thing I could write about is some time I’ve spent in psychiatric institutions. It could be a latterday riff on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” We started working on it, and someone close to him attempted suicide. And he said to me, “I noticed as we’re working on this together that you tend to go to the psychiatric hospital because you tried to kill yourself. Well, that’s interesting. And I think you could help some people if you focused a little bit more on that.” So I did.

When the article came out, so many people emailed me from all over the world. This one kid sticks in my mind, a 16-year-old kid writing to me from England—incredibly bright, feeling the need to be very literary in the writing but also in such obvious pain—who said, “I was Googling how to kill myself, and I came across your article, and I didn’t kill myself.” Enough of that [sort of response], and you’re like, OK, I’ve finally done something worthwhile with my writing, and I need to do something more lymphoma, the author blogged about her experience; some of these posts are included near the book’s end. She repeatedly shares her realizations, many of which border on cliché—e.g., “Love is light—only fully realized when it is reflected”; on love, “The only thing in this world that is truly pure and purely true. And in that singularity, I found god. Which is to say, I found myself.” Catudal writes far more about Rivs’ near death than about his astonishing survival.

You write at length about your own struggle with alcoholism and how you came to see suicidal thinking as a form of addiction, too.

I remember this one young woman, from a stay in a psychiatric hospital, who had tried to kill herself more times than I had. She was a very magnetic person. If I think about it now, it was so clear that she was addicted to the thought of killing herself—this was just an addiction in a very traditional sense. If she had told me she was addicted to vomiting or to cigarettes or to Instagram, I would have immediately understood it. But it was right there in front of me that she was addicted to suicide, and I didn’t see it. And I never saw it until I wrote the book. The idea is at least as old as the Buddha—that one of our fundamental, habitual sources of suffering is a commitment to the idea of self-annihilation. The idea is right there waiting for someone to grab it.

You’re a professor of philosophy, and there’s obviously a connection between that field of inquiry and the issue of suicide. Could you say more about that?

Virtually every great philosopher—at least up until the 20th century, when things change a little bit—wrote about suicide. It just seemed reasonable to them, when thinking about what constitutes the question of the good life, also to think about what constitutes the question of a good death. You have a handful of great Christian philosophers who are writing against it for various reasons—some of them for social/ political reasons, some of them for theological reasons. Once we get past the Enlightenment, they’re all writing in defense of the right to suicide because they see it as part of the emancipation of the life of the mind from the dogmatism of a particular Judeo-Christian worldview.

I took an interest in the question of how many of the major and minor philosophers actually took their own lives, and it turns out that very, very few of them did. There’s a handful, but they really are in the minority compared with poets and writers and painters—even scientists and mathematicians. I believe that is due to the fact that if you take a good hard look at life—under ordinary human circumstances, up until maybe a certain age and a certain level of physical or mental deterioration—you will conclude that life is worth living. There might be very, very rough days, but those will come to an end and the sun will come out from behind the clouds again. I think a philosophical disposition, at the end of the day, actually leads one toward resisting the kinds of suicides typically associated with depression, despair, meaninglessness of life worries, all these kinds of things. Most of the great existential philosophers who considered this question seriously come to the same conclusion, that suffering is meaningful rather than meaningless.

What is your hope for the book?

My first hope is that people who are repeat suicide attempters will see the thing that I have started to see, that suicide is a bad idea. I might still want to do it, but at least I can see: Nope, that’s a bad idea. I hope that it will help some other people who have tried suicide, and failed, to shift their thinking so that they no longer see it as one good option that’s waiting out there for them.

My next hope is that it can contribute to a growing movement to help suicidal people generally, and particularly that it can become part of our national conversation about helping young people avoid making an attempt. The vast majority of the time suicide is not an impulsive act—it’s an expression of a pattern of thinking that’s been a long time in the making, and it’s going to take some real work on the part of that person and their loved ones to change that pattern of thinking, if we have the opportunity to do so.

The book has two appendices full of helpful resources—articles, books, websites, videos, podcasts, and interviews. Is there one you’d like to highlight for readers here?

One that I find to be particularly powerful is a series of portraits with people telling their stories that’s done by a suicidologist named Dese’Rae L. Stage. The website is Live ThroughThis.org, and it’s very, very effective. There’s also the Trevor Project for LGBTQ+ kids (thetrevorproject.org) that is incredibly important for the most vulnerable population right now. Those are two that I think are particularly good and undermentioned.

A heart-wrenching, sincere memoir weighed down by insipid revelations such as, “Everything simply was.”

Stewdio

The Naphic Grovel

ARTrilogy of Chuck D

Chuck D Enemy Books/Akashic (720 pp.)

$59.95 paper | June 6, 2023

9781636141008

The Public Enemy mastermind combines art and hip-hop rhymes to provide his compelling, personal views on the chaotic years between 2020 and 2022.

Though they often feel like diary entries, each installment has an overarching storyline and theme. “There’s a Poison Goin’ On,” written in 2020, began as a chronicle of Public Enemy’s planned social media hoax to kick out rapper Flavor Flav to generate attention to promote its new album. Of course, the pandemic interrupted that plan, but Chuck D, who started out as a graphic design major at Adelphi University, decided to capture his thoughts of those days in words and drawings. His drawings in this installment are mostly impressionistic, immediate reactions to significant events—e.g., the March 12 entry, in which he discusses the NBA deciding to go on hiatus and the cancellation of the annual South by Southwest conference. Because they capture those moments, Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci make multiple appearances along with players in Public Enemy’s world. Trump takes on the prime role in the second installment, “45 Daze of Red Octobot,” which covers the tumultuous, exhausting 2020 presidential campaign between Trump and Joe Biden. Here, the author writes in rhyming couplets, and he adds charming portraits of stars like Questlove and George Clinton as well as less-than-charming likenesses of Trump and members of his administration. Chuck D also shows how much power he can pack in a couplet: “For those non believers denying the climate effect toll / There are clear waterways and melted ice in the arctic North Pole.” The final section, “Datamber Mindpaper: Attack of the Screenagers,” is the most impressive. Also written in couplets, it masterfully combines an indictment of experiencing life through a smartphone with reverent appreciations of the lives of those who didn’t, including such major historical figures as Sidney Poitier and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

In an engaging, distinctly hip-hop style, Chuck D reveals important lessons from the early pandemic years.

THE OVERLOOKED AMERICANS The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country

Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth

Basic Books (432 pp.)

$32.00 | June 6, 2023

9781541646728

A lively dismantling of preconceptions about the rural U.S.

Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy and author of The Sum of Small Things and The Warhol Economy, makes a convincing case that the sharp divide we have come to imagine exists between urban and rural America is more a result of lazy or prejudiced journalism than reality. Using an intriguing combination of statistical analysis and extensive telephone interviews with a range of residents, she argues that “the depiction of rural America as a cultural backwater, rife with pathologies and problems,” doesn’t reflect the lived experience of the 20% of Americans who live in areas defined as rural. In fact, residents of these areas have lives as “varied and diverse” as those in cities. In particular, the author found very little evidence of anger directed by residents of rural areas toward city dwellers. Examining “the ongoing narrative of the poor, angry Trump voter” and taking a deep dive into the data, she found “not that Trump voters are angry, poor, and left behind, but rather that they are in regions with high home ownership and low unemployment” and that “most people voted for him not because they felt left out of the economic system or desired a deeper reckoning, but rather because they wanted to.” (Many readers may wonder why they wanted to.) The author suggests that when urban Americans think about rural America, they tend to think about Appalachia and, in particular, West Virginia, areas that have been ravaged by opioid abuse but whose experiences do not reflect small-town life as a whole. CurridHalkett, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania and now lives in Los Angeles, found the process of getting to know her interviewees, often over a long period of time, a positive experience. “To sit on the phone for an hour or so with each of these people,” she writes, “was one of the most heartening experiences of my life.”

A hopeful and provocative analysis bound to raise discussion.

COURTING INDIA Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire

Das, Nandini

Pegasus (400 pp.)

$29.95 | April 4, 2023

9781639363223

A richly textured account of the first Englishman to make meaningful contact with India via the Mughal court in the early 17th century.

In 1615, Thomas Roe (1581-1644) became the first ambassador to the Mughal court, and he was enormously influential in how India was portrayed in England henceforth. As Oxford historian Das shows, at the beginning of the reign of James I, England had not yet become a colonial power, as Elizabeth I had embraced isolationism in international politics. Nonetheless, the English were hungry for luxury goods; James needed to raise money, and trade with Asia was integral. The East India Company, founded in 1600, was increasing its profits every year. The eager Roe, who had cut his teeth in the Amazon basin and then at the Ottoman court, was recommended to the post of ambassador so that English interests could be secured. Das examines the fabled reputation of India before Roe arrived, especially through the works of Chaucer, Ariosto, and Shakespeare. The author vividly describes Roe’s acceptance at the sumptuous court of Jahangir at Agra. She delves intriguingly into the roles of his sons, in-laws, and harem as well as the elaborate court rituals and layers of access, the role of women, and, most vexing for Roe, “the problem of finding and giving the right gifts.” Das offers elucidating digressions into the roles of Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry, and Jahangir’s queen, Mihr-un-Nisa, “the effective co-sovereign” of the empire. Ultimately, Roe had to adjust his initial view of the emperor as a “stock-figure of Asian tyranny” and his duplicitous court as rather more warmhearted and nuanced. Keen to the incursions of the Portuguese and Dutch, Roe was anxious to secure British trade interests because, at the time, “European politics was a powder keg waiting to explode.”

Ornately detailed study of an early ambassador, with an emphasis on fruitful trade in India.

THE COURAGE TO BE FREE Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival

DeSantis, Ron Broadside Books/HarperCollins

(288 pp.)

$28.00 | Feb. 28, 2023

9780063276000

Florida’s governor describes how he turned his state into a “citadel of freedom in a world gone mad.”

While DeSantis offers few glimpses into his inner life, it’s clear that he has a healthy sense of self-regard. As he recounts his past, he depicts himself moving from success to success: Little League stardom, captain of Yale’s baseball team, Harvard Law School, officer corps in the Navy, Congress, and chief executive of the Sunshine State. The author presents himself as someone who governs through sheer force of will, never admitting to a single moment of doubt or weakness. At the same time, his ambition compels him to qualify some of his achievements. He characterizes his Ivy League education as something that happened to him, not something he chose, and he takes pains to portray himself as a perpetual political outsider even after winning three terms in Congress. “I may have been serving in Washington, but I would never become of Washington,” he writes. Burnishing his populist bona fides also means asserting that, while he was born and raised in Florida, his upbringing was shaped by the “working-class” values of family in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Most of the gubernatorial “accomplishments” DeSantis boasts about will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention since 2019. He touts his opposition to “open borders,” increased penalties for “mob violence” in the wake of legitimate protests, and efforts to protect students from critical race theory and children from transgender Disney characters. He devotes entire chapters to his refusal to bow to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Covid-19 pandemic, his attacks on “woke corporatism,” and his disdain for “legacy media.” Anyone hoping for DeSantis to dunk on Donald Trump is going to be disappointed. Except for a few subtle swipes, the governor cannily refers to the ex-president only when establishing himself as the new face of “America First.”

Boldly grandiose, turgid, and remarkably unenlightening.

DIARY OF A TUSCAN BOOKSHOP A Memoir

Donati, Alba

Trans. by Elena Pala

Scribner (224 pp.)

$17.99 paper | May 30, 2023

9781668015568

Charming tale of an Italian book publicist and poet who “launched a [successful] crowdfunding campaign on Facebook to open a bookshop in a tiny village in the mountains.”

In 2019, Donati decided to quit the city rat race and return to Lucignana, inhabited by 180 people, including the author’s 101-year-old mother, with whom she had a complicated relationship. With the help of friends, relatives, and strangers, she raised enough money to open Libreria Sopra la Penna. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit Italy hard a couple months later, and a fire that destroyed much of the building and its stock, the business continues to operate. Donati constructs her story as a series of journal entries from January to June 2021, when pandemic regulations in Italy were still in constant flux and the bookstore was holding its own with the help of local volunteers and a steady mail-order business. Each of the dozens of entries ends with a catalog of books ordered on that day, lists on which British and American titles hold their own with Italian ones, and Emily Dickinson calendars and novels by Fannie Flagg reveal a surprising popularity. While each of the entries is loosely anchored by the homely events of that day—whether that means planting some clover in the garden or welcoming a few guests on days when travel is permitted—Donati doesn’t confine herself to the present. She meditates on the books she likes (and dislikes) and experiences growing up, and she traces the connections among five generations of her family. As the narrative proceeds, readers get a clear sense of the mercurial, devotedly feminist Donati and her tastes in literature as well as a slightly foggier but alluring sense of a daily life that seems to be dominated by making choices of flowers for the garden and packing up a few books and literary-themed jars of jam.

Readers beware: will cause the irresistible desire to open a small bookstore.

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN My Life in Afghanistan Fighting To Educate Women

Durrani, Pashtana & Tamara Bralo Citadel/Kensington (288 pp.)

$24.99 | May 23, 2023

9780806542447

A Pashtun girls’ education advocate and tribal leader reflects on Afghanistan’s uncertain future.

Despite being a “third-generation refugee,” Durrani considers herself “privileged.” The daughter of an influential tribal leader, she grew up in a home large enough to dedicate two rooms to a family-run community school—despite the fact that her family owned land in Pakistan where they could have lived. Although Durrani understood that “educating girls was our family business,” it wasn’t until her 9-year-old friend and academic rival was forced to drop out of school to marry a widower in his late 30s that Durrani’s interest in this field went from professional to personal. “If you’re a tribal woman,” she writes, “the bar for activism is low. Trained our entire lives to be neither seen nor heard, whenever one of us tries to raise her voice, it becomes a political act.” Much to her mother’s dismay, the author’s dedication to girls’ education was so intense that she turned down a prestigious college preparation program at Oxford to start a nonprofit organization that used pre-loaded, solar-powered tablets to deliver educational content to Afghan girls who were unable to access formal schooling. When the pandemic, the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and—most devastatingly—her father’s unexpected death threatened the group’s future and her family’s financial security, Durrani was forced to choose between her mission and her life. Written with the assistance of veteran war correspondent Bralo, the text offers consistently adept observations, whether describing a dangerous border crossing as a mission that “required a Beyoncé-like number of wardrobe changes” or trenchantly illustrating how the widely underestimated tribal culture was, in fact, nimbler than the Afghan government and Western aid. Durrani’s voice sparkles with humor and grit, and she is a gifted storyteller, equally comfortable analyzing Afghanistan’s gender inequity and defending the strengths of the oft-underestimated culture and country she loves.

A lovingly narrated, sharply nuanced memoir from a talented activist.

THE POINT OF NO RETURN American Democracy at the Crossroads

Edsall, Thomas Byrne

Princeton Univ. (448 pp.)

$32.00 | April 11, 2023

9780691164892

A journalist with a penchant for political economics delivers a series of sharp judgments on the conditions that made Donald Trump possible.

“The Trump era is not over yet—forewarned is forearmed.” So writes Edsall in this collection of opinion pieces from the New York Times, beginning in 2015. While it seems clear that the author is no fan of Trump’s, he takes an evenhanded approach in his analysis of events. For one thing, he notes, Trump took about the same share of White voters as did Mitt Romney four years earlier, but that White constituency was very different: “Trump won non-college-educated whites by 14 points more than Romney, a modern-day record.” Moreover, Edsall notes, the Whites Trump won were largely blue collar and lived in the Rust Belt, states that Obama had carried against Romney. Not coincidentally, Trump won among lower-income Whites, as well, who had suffered economically for any number of reasons—not least of them, Edsall observes, free trade with China, which had offshored many jobs. Given current tensions with China, that may change. In any event, the author notes that the Democratic Party once positioned itself as the champion of working-class people but has attracted and served wealthier voters—even as, Edsall observes in a typically statistics-dense op-ed, the share of gross national product held by Democratic districts had increased to 63.6% by 2019. All of this speaks to a central truth about Trump. “Because the viewpoint he represents is now so widespread, he is in one sense personally irrelevant—a symptom rather than a cause,” writes the author. One manifestation of that viewpoint is the polarization that Edsall bravely quantifies, and another is a campaign of Republican legislative efforts aimed at voter suppression, “a strategy more dangerous than the January 6, 2021, insurrectionists who sought by violent means to block the orderly transition from one president to another.” Political trend watchers and history buffs alike will benefit from Edsall’s insights.

Building

Ellison is a New York City renovation carpenter who lays claim to additional skills as a welder, sculptor, contractor, cabinetmaker, inventor, and industrial designer. In his first book, he describes his work on high-end construction projects such as a Park Avenue apartment renovation under the auspices of his “first ‘name’ architect,” the makeover of a Central Park West aerie designed for “prominent Buddhists,” and a deluxe beauxarts town house that is a proud neighbor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ellison also built the penthouse “Apartment of the Decade” of the 2010s, as designated by Interior Design magazine, and he was profiled in a long essay in the New Yorker pegged to tours of two of his most acclaimed projects. You might expect his memoir to concern itself primarily with issues of building expertise as well as recollections of his collaborations with star architects. However, the text is more reminiscent of Robert M. Pirsig’s classic metaphysical contemplation Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While Ellison is clearly attentive to technical prowess and skillful craft, his real subjects are philosophy and the existential aspects of living in the modern world. In a prologue, the author calls it a “book for people who are interested in doing anything well.” Ellison titles the chapters based on concepts meaningful to him (“Belief,” “Talent,” “Competence”), and each contains a few simple lessons applicable to all manner of pursuits. Along the way, the author considers the lost traditions of craftsmanship, class conflict between homeowners and renovators, and the importance of both speed and precision in every endeavor. “In the last decade,” he writes, “I’ve been able to act as a bridge between the cerebral world of design professionals and the skilled and sweaty world of the workers who realize their visions.”

Ellison demonstrates how skills in construction and design have deep resonance in more general problems of living.

SING, MEMORY

The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps

Eyre, Makana

Norton (352 pp.)

$32.50 | May 23, 2023

9780393531862

An uplifting story of music emanating from the depths of one of the 20th century’s most horrific periods.

A Carpenter’s