ONE FRIDAY IN APRIL

Unflinchingly honest accounts of the author’s personal experiences and his perceptions of societal misunderstandings about suicide.

Antrim begins this concise memoir on the evening in April 2006 when he almost plummeted from his Brooklyn fire escape. “I was there to die,” he writes, “but dying was not a plan. I was not making choices, threats, or mistakes. I was…looking back now, in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate that. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons.” Immediately preceding this event was strife with his girlfriend, but his illness—what Antrim qualifies by stating, “I try not to speak about depression. I prefer to call it suicide”—started in childhood. This story, parts of which first appeared in the New Yorker, is not one of survival after the fall but of holding on. After not jumping, Antrim, then 47, checked himself into a hospital and spent four months at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Fractured into vignettes of anguished memories, lists of medications, and ruminations, the narrative is defiantly nonlinear and brilliantly reflective of the author’s state of being: anxious, inert, unworthy. Unlike a flat line, Antrim’s talent for storytelling is more similar to Russian nesting dolls: moments within moments that build upon each other as recollections and revelations. The treatment that proved most effective was electroconvulsive therapy, of which Antrim had been terrified. Interestingly, he decided to try it after receiving a call from David Foster Wallace, who’d heard about his situation from a mutual friend and phoned to say that ECT had saved his own life decades earlier. Although he returned, in 2010, for another stint in the institute, Antrim writes of his life, in between and presently, as healthy.

Slim yet formidable, a mind-bendingly good read.