Book review: ‘How Not to Kill Yourself’ by Clancy Martin

In fact, this is what I was clinically trained to do, not to take a person out of their depression but to stay with them in it until they are ready to emerge — and to do so without mirroring their hopelessness. Recognition of the division between yourself and the patient — that you feel one way and they feel another — acts like a buoy helping you save them without drowning in the process.

Suicide and depression throw this approach into relief — and not just for psychoanalysts. The problem is that some literature of suicide suffers from being rather convincing. Suicidal speech has a contagious quality, pulling you into its orbit, spreading negativity and exacerbating forms of destructive enjoyment. The literature is less dangerous to those who are not actively suicidal, but that doesn’t mean those who are should avoid reading about the experiences of others. To the contrary, it is important to read accounts of similar hardships so one doesn’t feel isolated and fail to reach out for help. The trouble is that doing so can also provide the wrong kinds of comfort, persuading when it should reassure.

Never have I read a book so aware of this dilemma as to be practically swimming in it as Clancy Martin’s “How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind.”Martin is a professor of philosophy and an acclaimed novelist and essayist. This book is the story of his many suicide attempts, his descent into alcoholism and attempt to sober up, his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as the disintegration of several marriages and his relationships with his children.

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. In the opening “A Note to the Reader,” he explains, “I wrote this book especially for the people like me … who still struggle with the desire to kill themselves.”Very quickly, however, he has to issue a warning and a directive: “That said, if you’re in serious crisis right now, if you’re reading this and thinking of doing it, please turn to Appendix I, ‘Tools for Crisis,’ where I list some resources that can immediately help.” Then he goes on to suggest the second appendix, “In Case of Emergency: Interviews on Staying Alive,” for those who might be feeling bad but are able to read something longer. He concludes the note: “Naturally, my aspiration is that you will read the whole book and that it will encourage you to keep on going, even when things feel hopeless.” Naturally.

Self-help philosophy, inspired by Socrates, that avoids the hard questions

As the book carries on, these cautions circulate around his uncertainty about how to talk about his own experiences. Martin is constantly painted into a corner and he knows it, writing at one point: “This entire book could be nothing more than my own posturing at seeming like someone who is trying to escape from his suicidality, or deeper, like someone who is sincerely suicidal despite his many failed attempts, or still worse, like someone who feels that suicide is eluding him and he is trying to find his way further into the possibility of it.” He goes over his many suicide attempts — more than half a dozen — while also interrupting his characteristic zippy, compelling prose by pointing the reader toward the end of his narrative with the promise that he will give up this kind of thinking and emerge from his depression.

But one is on the side of suicide in this book for much longer than one is out the other end, into a land Martin calls “adult sanity.” Here, he is following David Foster Wallace, who wrote to Don DeLillo: “I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.” Wallace, of course, died by suicide. One of his main preoccupations was with feeling fraudulent, or what we now like to call impostor syndrome. Considering such cases, Martin notes that one can accept, for example, being a fraud and move on — an example of the adult sanity that eluded Wallace. And eventually (this is Martin’s main claim), the person can accept that they will always live with suicidal thoughts. These should be allowed to exist with all the other thoughts one has, especially not wanting to die. Sanity means not giving precedence to thoughts that make you unwell. A hard sell, even for Martin.

In the process of narrating his own experiences, Martin writes about the books that made him more suicidal, moving between philosophy, poetry and literature. He ultimately warns against them, despite the massive airtime they receive in his own narrative. Writers who died by suicide — including, to name a few of those important to Martin, — Jean Améry, Nelly Arcan, Édouard Levé, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf — exquisitely render the bottomless trap of the depressive mind. How, Martin wonders, is this psychic hell so beautiful, powerful and damning? Is it, perhaps, the very appeal of self-destruction that makes their own writing so compelling? The despairing writer survives another day by continuing to write (as does Martin), which seems to push language to the very edge of itself.

In the literature on this subject, words take on a percussive power “as if we all have our backs to a wall of truth that is hemming in on us,” the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan noted about “Hamlet.” The danger for the author arrives when the writing stops. For the reader, it’s when the reading really takes hold. Martin eventually recommends only a few choice authors (in one of his appendixes). What is the dividing line, the thing that makes a work unacceptable? Romanticizing. Arcan, for example, is much more ambivalent about suicide than many other writers who feel it is heroic, and for this reason she is something of a model for Martin, even if she, too, writes toward the death that also haunts him.

Martin recalls that after one of his suicide attempts, a fellow psychiatric patient gave him a copy of “Liars in Love,” by Richard Yates, a collection of short stories about addiction. The patient, also an addict, admits that, for him, reading the book may have done more harm than good. Martin, likewise, acknowledges that he had the same experience with A. Alvarez’s “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” and William Styron’s “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.”The trouble wasn’t that the books tried to make suicide appealing, but that “they made it seem inevitable,” Martin writes. The lines between speaking about depression, believing in the myth of the romantic tragic artist and making suicide seem as certain as death itself are very thin.

Having written this piece, I too am now implicated, having enticed others to read this book and enter the long genealogy of suicide literature. I admire this book, admire what it wants to do and be. Whether it helps, I think, might depend on which side of the wall between hope and hopelessness that the reader is on.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. A writer, most recently of “Disorganization and Sex” (Divided, 2022), she teaches at the New School for Social Research.

A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

Help for those in crisis:

If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. You can also reach a crisis counselor by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741. Disaster survivors can also reach out to the disaster distress helpline at 800-985-5990.

To support someone going through a mentally tough time: Offer a safe space to talk and listen. Validate and affirm their feelings. Don’t engage in toxic positivity. Don’t be pushy with advice. Ask how you can help. In recent years, depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation have reached historic highs, especially among children and teens. Experts say urgent reforms are needed for America’s underfunded, fragmented and difficult-to-access mental health system.