San Antonio College Library

When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You're saying, I'm gone and you can't even be sure who it is that's gone, because you never knew me. Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham's father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index, that most formal and orderly of structures, Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible...

In this deeply moving but also practical book, authors Judy Zionts Fox and Mia Roldan share the results of their survey of children of a parental suicide as well as discussing what is helpful to suicide survivors and what is not.

A portrait of former Capitol Hill speechwriter Guy Waterman follows his decision to leave civilization and live off the land in a Vermont cabin, describing his passionate pursuit of mountain climbing and his controversial suicide.

Over the years, Dee has refused to send him bus fare, changed her phone number, and asked him not to come home. Now her manic-depressive son, Mark, needs a lifeline again, and she must decide now much more she's willing to give.

Saint Maybe is the rich and absorbing story of a young man's guilt over his brother's death and his struggle to atone for the wrong he feels he has done. On a quiet street in Baltimore in 1965, seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe lives with his family in an "ideal, apple-pie household," enjoying the comfort of family traditions and indulging in all the usual dreams of the future. Until one night, when Ian's stinging words to his brother bring tragedy --...

A power struggle between a leading student at an elite institute for psychics and her jealous legendary mentor culminates in the student being forced to relive her mother's suicide during a brutal psychic attack.

"When Laura Trujillo's mother jumps off a ledge in the Grand Canyon and falls to her death, Laura sets out to discover what drove her mother's actions, and begins to explore the painful secrets they shared. As a young girl, Laura was happy that her mother, divorced and remarried, seemed happy again, and so she hides it when her stepfather begins to abuse her. Now grown up with a family of her own, after her mother dies, Laura goes in search of the...

The suicide of a woman and the disappearance of her teenage son, Mark, draws the boy's uncle, Timothy Underhill, back to his hometown of Millhaven, where his investigation uncovers a neighborhood haunted by a serial killer.

Set in the academic world of Harvard and Cambridge, this acclaimed novel dramatizes the plight of the embattled American liberal in the 1950s. Its central character is Edward Cavan, a brilliant English professor, who commits suicide. His death sets off a shock wave among Cavan's friends -- and changes things for some of them forever.

"Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicide. Gayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant...