ABOVE: The Suicide of Lucretia (1538) by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Legend of a Suicide By David Vann (Penguin, £7.99)
A friend passes me a book. It’s by a young American writer called David Vann—five short stories and a novella which burst like fireworks from one single terrible fact: the suicide of a father. A real father. His father. The stories and the novella are billed as works of fiction, but the writer’s father—we know this from the author’s acknowledgements—did in fact kill himself when the writer was a teenager.
With this in mind, I can’t help but pick the book up with a certain taste already in my mouth. Because even if the account has in some way been fictionalised—and why not?—the knowledge that it was inspired by a truth hugely colours my response to it. When it comes to suicide, we think we already know the plot, and certainly we know the ending. The father will die, the son will lose the father. So I already have a sense of what emotional shape this book, for all its claims of being a fiction, might take. I’m more than willing to go on the ride, but it’s unlikely that there will be any big surprises, right?
Wrong. There are surprises. Or, to be more specific, Vann’s book contains one enormous surprise so unthinkable—and yet, when you do think about it, so emotionally fitting—that it acts like a body blow. I don’t think I’ve ever been so torn apart, so changed, by an apparently straightforward mechanism of fiction. I can’t remember, either, when a book last demolished so many of my expectations about what shape a narrative might take and about how much truth can, or should, be told by altering, rather than sticking to, the facts. Most of all, though, I am just shocked. For a while my encounter with this little book challenges everything I thought I knew about the limits of what fiction can do.
My own father killed himself. In a sealed garage, in his car, on a new year’s eve almost 19 years ago. A lonely man, a lonely death, and one that actually seems lonelier and sadder—and possibly even more tragically preventable—the older I grow. I’ve explored this death now and then in both fiction and memoir. I write about the things that haunt, excite and frighten me, and my father’s death—alien, yet at the same time a visceral part of who I am, who I’ve become—does all three.
Like a bad tooth that is OK when you don’t touch it, but where one little probe of the tongue shoots off pain, the fact of his self-inflicted death seems always to be there, waiting for me. When the probing is deliberate—because writing has also become my way of finding things out—I struggle to be as truthful as I can: out of respect for my father. Or that’s what I tell myself. I know it’s not the whole story.
I know I am tempted by the queasy exhilaration that comes from engaging with my deepest fears. Why is that prospect so enticing? I’ve come to think it’s partly about a wish to wrestle with something dangerous and take control. Because there aren’t really that many choices: whatever you do, these things lurk, they come back to get you. You close your eyes, hoping to relax into some benign imaginary world, and all this dark debris comes floating to the surface.
I never wanted to look in the window of the garage in the days after my father died, but my husband made me. His impulse was a good one. That glimpse of an empty and dull concrete room seemed, on some level anyway, to banish the more terrifying imaginary one in my head. But all these years on, when I try to think or, especially, write about my father, I force myself to look again through that little window and I see things I don’t want to see. His pale, drunken, asphyxiated face. The appalling end of the man who wore a beige wool cardigan and told me jokes and took me swimming and was my daddy. You think you’re safe, you think you’ve done all you can to face up to your fears, but still your imagination awaits.
But there are many different ways to take control, and Vann chooses one I’d never even thought of, though the writer in me wishes I had. Part of the shock of what he does—and I’d love to tell you what it is, but I promise you need your innocence intact if you’re going to experience this book—stems from expectations. You know this book is based on a reality. You think you know the limits of that reality. So you’re not even slightly ready when, through a leap of fictional daring, he takes things one horrible stage further.
It’s that horror which is key. There’s a streak of reckless violence at the heart of this book which rings truer than anything else I’ve read on the subject. For anyone who has come up close to a suicide, the part that haunts you, the part that’s so hard to convey, is the violence of it—the fact that someone intent on leaving life (and you) forever was prepared to commit an act of irreversible physical violence in order to make it happen, an act that will then be inscribed onto others. Vann does not shrink from this fact. And what’s fascinating to me is that he wrestles with it by altering something fundamental that took place in the real world, producing fiction that becomes not less, but more truthful as a result.
There may be a process of reclamation or even redemption in what Vann has done by bringing his father—his shame, his sadness, his possibilities—back to life in fiction, but it may equally be a way of redressing the balance: a kind of existential arm-wrestle restoring his own sense of filial power.
The impulse to share personal experience is a dangerous one. However courageous and truthful an author might like to think he or she is being, the attempt to convey something emotionally real can expose far more than you bargained for. The trouble with the truth is that you rarely have any idea where you’re going with it. Writing memoir from the heart is a step into the darkness. With my last book, The Lost Child, I had no idea, when I began to chase the ghost of a young woman who had died almost 200 years ago, as I attempted to convey the random, tubercular death of a stranger, that what would actually surface would be everything I was feeling at that moment about my own child and my inability to keep him safe.
I set out to write a straightforward, non-fictional account of the life of a young girl who died in 1838. It was a small, ordinary life and that was the point. Something about its ordinariness and brevity, the fact that it seemed to stand for so many other brief, unrecorded lives, moved me. But writers can be dim. Perhaps it should have been obvious to me, as I stood on a wintry morning in a Norfolk churchyard looking for her grave and burst into tears, that I wasn’t crying for her but for my own child and for myself.
I thought that work would take me somewhere else, but it didn’t. It led me straight back, and with great force, to what was happening at home. Still, it wasn’t until I sat down to write—and realised I could go no further with this project unless I also wrote about what was really in my head—that I began to weave the two stories together. Spending time with the girl became a way of spending time—in my head, heart and on the page—with my son. In doing so, it felt like I edged a little closer to both of them. I didn’t expect for one moment that I would end up writing about my father too. But, as I tried to write about what was (and to me still is) the most painful part of the story—the day we asked our son to leave our home—I realised I couldn’t do it honestly without revisiting my own father’s rejection of me at a similar age.
I knew that what I was doing was risky. I could have chosen to write a fiction about it. If you can spin spells with fiction, it feels as if the power and control is yours. But fiction would have somehow put a lid on the whole thing—that very sense of narrative control would have made it safe. And I didn’t want safety. Neither did I really want power or control. The material—even the 200-year-old material—felt so close and sad. All I could think of to do was lose myself in it and see what came out. What I ended up with was always going to be a mother’s account—distraught, flawed and fatally subjective. But a bit like looking into the garage after my father died—if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t know.
Maybe it’s that curiosity which is the writer’s fatal flaw. Once you’ve seen that the place exists, it’s very hard not to go there. And once you’ve been there, how can you possibly resist the impulse to tell others what you saw?
What Vann and I have in common are fathers who died in a particular way. What we don’t have in common is that I have written openly about a person whom I love intensely and who is still alive. I think I will always feel pretty naked when it comes to my own book, but Vann has a safer cloak of fiction wrapped around his—though I would say that by allowing us to know so much of the truth, he’s kept that cloak deliberately, bravely transparent. He appears to have familial consent, but who knows what private pain he is—wittingly or unwittingly—bringing into a public domain. I hope that his family are gentle with him and see that the impulse that made him write was an essential, questing one.
I am one reader who is glad his book exists. It took me to a raw, terrible place and made me think deeply again about my father. I thought I’d done enough of that, but it turned out I hadn’t. Vann inhabits and even co-opts his dead father’s inner life, making it his own. By doing something so daring and brutal, his book showed me things about myself and my relationship with my father’s suicide which I don’t think I could have worked out on my own. In a way that I imagine will only become clear to me months or maybe even years from now, his book moved my life on a little bit. Yes, it’s a piece of fiction, but fiction can come from a primal place.
The earliest piece I ever wrote about my father’s suicide—a truthful description of a recurring nightmare I used to have where he doused himself in petrol and then chucked a lit match on his coat—was written in my diary at least five years before he killed himself. It was a dream in which, I admit, I saw literary possibilities, and it got written down because even back then that was all I could do well: write. Once on the page, it began to feel more like fiction—which it was. It wasn’t until years later that it changed shape completely and seemed, accidentally, to tell far more of the truth than I could ever have dreamed.
Legend of a Suicide By David Vann (Penguin, £7.99)
A friend passes me a book. It’s by a young American writer called David Vann—five short stories and a novella which burst like fireworks from one single terrible fact: the suicide of a father. A real father. His father. The stories and the novella are billed as works of fiction, but the writer’s father—we know this from the author’s acknowledgements—did in fact kill himself when the writer was a teenager.
With this in mind, I can’t help but pick the book up with a certain taste already in my mouth. Because even if the account has in some way been fictionalised—and why not?—the knowledge that it was inspired by a truth hugely colours my response to it. When it comes to suicide, we think we already know the plot, and certainly we know the ending. The father will die, the son will lose the father. So I already have a sense of what emotional shape this book, for all its claims of being a fiction, might take. I’m more than willing to go on the ride, but it’s unlikely that there will be any big surprises, right?
Wrong. There are surprises. Or, to be more specific, Vann’s book contains one enormous surprise so unthinkable—and yet, when you do think about it, so emotionally fitting—that it acts like a body blow. I don’t think I’ve ever been so torn apart, so changed, by an apparently straightforward mechanism of fiction. I can’t remember, either, when a book last demolished so many of my expectations about what shape a narrative might take and about how much truth can, or should, be told by altering, rather than sticking to, the facts. Most of all, though, I am just shocked. For a while my encounter with this little book challenges everything I thought I knew about the limits of what fiction can do.
My own father killed himself. In a sealed garage, in his car, on a new year’s eve almost 19 years ago. A lonely man, a lonely death, and one that actually seems lonelier and sadder—and possibly even more tragically preventable—the older I grow. I’ve explored this death now and then in both fiction and memoir. I write about the things that haunt, excite and frighten me, and my father’s death—alien, yet at the same time a visceral part of who I am, who I’ve become—does all three.
Like a bad tooth that is OK when you don’t touch it, but where one little probe of the tongue shoots off pain, the fact of his self-inflicted death seems always to be there, waiting for me. When the probing is deliberate—because writing has also become my way of finding things out—I struggle to be as truthful as I can: out of respect for my father. Or that’s what I tell myself. I know it’s not the whole story.
I know I am tempted by the queasy exhilaration that comes from engaging with my deepest fears. Why is that prospect so enticing? I’ve come to think it’s partly about a wish to wrestle with something dangerous and take control. Because there aren’t really that many choices: whatever you do, these things lurk, they come back to get you. You close your eyes, hoping to relax into some benign imaginary world, and all this dark debris comes floating to the surface.
I never wanted to look in the window of the garage in the days after my father died, but my husband made me. His impulse was a good one. That glimpse of an empty and dull concrete room seemed, on some level anyway, to banish the more terrifying imaginary one in my head. But all these years on, when I try to think or, especially, write about my father, I force myself to look again through that little window and I see things I don’t want to see. His pale, drunken, asphyxiated face. The appalling end of the man who wore a beige wool cardigan and told me jokes and took me swimming and was my daddy. You think you’re safe, you think you’ve done all you can to face up to your fears, but still your imagination awaits.
But there are many different ways to take control, and Vann chooses one I’d never even thought of, though the writer in me wishes I had. Part of the shock of what he does—and I’d love to tell you what it is, but I promise you need your innocence intact if you’re going to experience this book—stems from expectations. You know this book is based on a reality. You think you know the limits of that reality. So you’re not even slightly ready when, through a leap of fictional daring, he takes things one horrible stage further.
It’s that horror which is key. There’s a streak of reckless violence at the heart of this book which rings truer than anything else I’ve read on the subject. For anyone who has come up close to a suicide, the part that haunts you, the part that’s so hard to convey, is the violence of it—the fact that someone intent on leaving life (and you) forever was prepared to commit an act of irreversible physical violence in order to make it happen, an act that will then be inscribed onto others. Vann does not shrink from this fact. And what’s fascinating to me is that he wrestles with it by altering something fundamental that took place in the real world, producing fiction that becomes not less, but more truthful as a result.
There may be a process of reclamation or even redemption in what Vann has done by bringing his father—his shame, his sadness, his possibilities—back to life in fiction, but it may equally be a way of redressing the balance: a kind of existential arm-wrestle restoring his own sense of filial power.
The impulse to share personal experience is a dangerous one. However courageous and truthful an author might like to think he or she is being, the attempt to convey something emotionally real can expose far more than you bargained for. The trouble with the truth is that you rarely have any idea where you’re going with it. Writing memoir from the heart is a step into the darkness. With my last book, The Lost Child, I had no idea, when I began to chase the ghost of a young woman who had died almost 200 years ago, as I attempted to convey the random, tubercular death of a stranger, that what would actually surface would be everything I was feeling at that moment about my own child and my inability to keep him safe.
I set out to write a straightforward, non-fictional account of the life of a young girl who died in 1838. It was a small, ordinary life and that was the point. Something about its ordinariness and brevity, the fact that it seemed to stand for so many other brief, unrecorded lives, moved me. But writers can be dim. Perhaps it should have been obvious to me, as I stood on a wintry morning in a Norfolk churchyard looking for her grave and burst into tears, that I wasn’t crying for her but for my own child and for myself.
I thought that work would take me somewhere else, but it didn’t. It led me straight back, and with great force, to what was happening at home. Still, it wasn’t until I sat down to write—and realised I could go no further with this project unless I also wrote about what was really in my head—that I began to weave the two stories together. Spending time with the girl became a way of spending time—in my head, heart and on the page—with my son. In doing so, it felt like I edged a little closer to both of them. I didn’t expect for one moment that I would end up writing about my father too. But, as I tried to write about what was (and to me still is) the most painful part of the story—the day we asked our son to leave our home—I realised I couldn’t do it honestly without revisiting my own father’s rejection of me at a similar age.
I knew that what I was doing was risky. I could have chosen to write a fiction about it. If you can spin spells with fiction, it feels as if the power and control is yours. But fiction would have somehow put a lid on the whole thing—that very sense of narrative control would have made it safe. And I didn’t want safety. Neither did I really want power or control. The material—even the 200-year-old material—felt so close and sad. All I could think of to do was lose myself in it and see what came out. What I ended up with was always going to be a mother’s account—distraught, flawed and fatally subjective. But a bit like looking into the garage after my father died—if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t know.
Maybe it’s that curiosity which is the writer’s fatal flaw. Once you’ve seen that the place exists, it’s very hard not to go there. And once you’ve been there, how can you possibly resist the impulse to tell others what you saw?
What Vann and I have in common are fathers who died in a particular way. What we don’t have in common is that I have written openly about a person whom I love intensely and who is still alive. I think I will always feel pretty naked when it comes to my own book, but Vann has a safer cloak of fiction wrapped around his—though I would say that by allowing us to know so much of the truth, he’s kept that cloak deliberately, bravely transparent. He appears to have familial consent, but who knows what private pain he is—wittingly or unwittingly—bringing into a public domain. I hope that his family are gentle with him and see that the impulse that made him write was an essential, questing one.
I am one reader who is glad his book exists. It took me to a raw, terrible place and made me think deeply again about my father. I thought I’d done enough of that, but it turned out I hadn’t. Vann inhabits and even co-opts his dead father’s inner life, making it his own. By doing something so daring and brutal, his book showed me things about myself and my relationship with my father’s suicide which I don’t think I could have worked out on my own. In a way that I imagine will only become clear to me months or maybe even years from now, his book moved my life on a little bit. Yes, it’s a piece of fiction, but fiction can come from a primal place.
The earliest piece I ever wrote about my father’s suicide—a truthful description of a recurring nightmare I used to have where he doused himself in petrol and then chucked a lit match on his coat—was written in my diary at least five years before he killed himself. It was a dream in which, I admit, I saw literary possibilities, and it got written down because even back then that was all I could do well: write. Once on the page, it began to feel more like fiction—which it was. It wasn’t until years later that it changed shape completely and seemed, accidentally, to tell far more of the truth than I could ever have dreamed.
