In Clancy Martin’s new book, “How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind,” the novelist and philosopher recounts a time when he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Kansas City. He is arguing with a psychiatrist, Dr. Ellis, who has put him on seven medications. Martin doesn’t think he should be on lithium. Dr. Ellis is not convinced.
“Let’s talk about why you’re here,” the doctor says, reminding his patient that he had tried to kill himself. “How do you feel about waking up and learning that you could be dead?”
Martin has been through this routine before. This is not his first attempt—this isn’t even his first stay at this specific psychiatric hospital, nor will it be his last. As he writes later, “I’ve had so many rock bottoms that selecting one is more or less arbitrary.” For all that he’s been through, Martin feels he should be able to tell the doctor which pills he needs and which ones he doesn’t. Shouldn’t his experience count for something? But he eventually admits that the doctor can see the situation more clearly than he can. Soon, Martin finds himself doing a little daily performance for the doctor: spending time in the hallways so as not to seem reclusive, taking his pills, attending group sessions, outwardly exhibiting behaviors that match “some made-up idea of ordinary” and will secure his release.
“I was a jewelry salesman for years,” Martin writes, “and like any other salesperson, I specialized in the art of seeming to be what someone needed me to be, of telling people what I knew they wanted to hear.”
Since his début, in 2009, Martin has proved himself to be a writer with a consistent set of interests. There is the work of selling jewelry, nominally the subject of his first novel, “How to Sell”—a book drawn from years of experience he has described as his “graduate school in the dark arts” of deception. (“The vast majority of jewelry has no inherent value; the salesperson must create the perception of value.”) He edited an academic collection on “The Philosophy of Deception” for Oxford University Press and later wrote a book-length meditation on deceit titled “Love and Lies.” The self-deceptions of addiction and infidelity are drawn most intensely in his second novel, “Bad Sex,” but show up in much of the other work, too. Diamonds have a way of appearing in any of his stories and essays. That the narrators of both his novels resemble the author and share his obsessions and preferred self-obliterations (alcohol, adultery, dishonesty, luxury, suicide) is apparent.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.
The Martin we meet in “How Not to Kill Yourself” is a writer desperately working to find a way to be honest. After describing an attempt to end his life and the ways that he tried to lie or avoid questions about it, he introduces the two conflicting thoughts that have shaped his life: “I wish I was dead and I’m glad my suicides failed.” He has tried to take his own life more than ten times. “This book is the attempt to be honest about it,” he writes, “but hopefully it also shows the difficulty of being honest about it, since it is also the case that we just don’t know ourselves, our intentions and our desires and our beliefs, as well as we like to pretend, and we lie to ourselves even more often and with greater facility than we lie to others.”
Martin sees a fundamental link between dishonesty and suicidality. A husband, for example, may start withholding information from his wife as he begins to plan his attempt. Or, as in Martin’s case, one lie (relapsing into drinking, for example) can lead into the next, the shame of deception spiralling into suicidal ideation. Martin observes that two of the more reliable ways to disrupt a suicide are talking and walking, neither of which necessarily have anything to do with the person’s circumstantial problems. But what these activities can do is help, even for a brief moment, a person to see that “she is not locked in a coffin sinking into the sea.” The claustrophobic container of “lying, hiding, shame, secrecy, and loneliness” is at the center of Martin’s focus here. He is working to get hold of his thoughts and take them out for a walk.
It isn’t as easy as it might sound. The task that Martin has set up for himself in this book is an effort to write “honorably, respectfully, and sympathetically of people who have killed themselves or tried to kill themselves, including myself.” Writing about others, Martin is insightful and kind. What appears much more difficult is finding a way to write with sympathy for himself. He returns again and again to material that he describes as humiliating or shameful, sources of his self-loathing, miseries, and guilt. He tries to contextualize these experiences through the literature of suicide. He is motivated, he says, to work through these things for the benefit of fellow-sufferers—readers who, for example, might be looking for an answer to the question posed by the book’s title.
In a 2009 interview, the novelist Tao Lin asked Martin, who had just published “How to Sell,” when he was the closest to ending his life. Martin described his morning routine at the jewelry store: he’d wake up early, drink coffee, and get sick to his stomach. Then he’d go to the bathroom with a gun, do a few lines of coke, and think about killing himself. In “How Not to Kill Yourself,” Martin returns to those mornings in the jewelry store at length, trying to explain the thoughts going through his head at the time:
One of Martin’s gifts is his ability to reënter, decades later, the precise minutiae of his thought patterns: the chains of illogic that enable an alcoholic relapse, the incremental building of self-disregard and parasuicidal behavior (risk-taking, substance abuse, etc.) into explicit suicidal ideation, the awful tautologies of self-hate. (“All the more reason to end my life if I am the kind of contemptible person who wants to kill himself!”) This acuity makes him a gifted reader of other suicidal writers.
For a stretch in the middle, he devotes his attention almost fully to that task. He finds resonance between a Robin Williams riff on Marc Maron’s podcast and a four-thousand-year-old text written on Egyptian papyrus. He works through a history of intellectuals who made suicide pacts. He corresponds with Margo Jefferson, who tells him about the obligations of survival for Black women and prompts him to think about the intersection of race and suicidal ideation. Martin lands on one of the trickier paradoxes of the subject, that the “desire to kill oneself . . . may all be part, in a perverse way, of trying to escape from the desire to kill yourself.” Roving between ancient and contemporary literature, Martin projects a confidence of thought that is hard to square with that other guy in this book—the one capable of such terrible thinking. In a way, this illustrates one of the points that Martin is trying to get across: that thinking through suicidal questions when not in a crisis may be a way of putting off the next one.
But Martin is that other guy, too. He repeatedly shows us how much good advice he knows and yet has not followed. Immediately after explaining the airtight, statistically backed reasons a suicidal person should not own a gun, he tells us the noirish story of how he acquired his first. (He traded a used Rolex for a pair of Glocks scrubbed of their serial numbers.) He makes a strong case for those of us who have lost a loved one to suicide to try not to blame ourselves, and follows that by describing, over many pages, how he holds himself responsible for his own father’s death, which he can only suspect to have been suicide. We see, over the long outlines of his life, the gulf between intellectual knowledge and emotional acceptance.
Martin risks the limits of his reader’s sympathy. He recounts his failings as a parent in such vivid detail that, when he mentions a legal agreement with an ex-wife that prevents him from discussing in nonfiction any traumatic episodes that their children may have experienced, the mind spirals imagining what he possibly could have left out. Will a reader lose some compassion for Martin at the moment in the book when he turns around to see his five-year-old daughter holding his unattended Glock? Maybe. There are other incidents when he seems to suggest to the reader an opportunity to give up on him. But whatever loathing his confessions might elicit, it will never match the self-loathing of a man who has tried to kill himself ten times. Whatever shame may come from confessing these things, we come to understand, can’t match the shame of continuing to conceal them.
This approach has some kin with the argument that Melissa Febos recently made in “Body Work,” in defense of the confessional. “Avoiding a secret subject can be its own kind of bondage . . . refusing to write your story can make you into a monster,” Febos writes. “Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.”
For those of us who have been following Martin’s work, we also encounter quite a number of scenes and images we have read about before. On the last page of “How to Sell,” we encounter a box of the main character’s father’s ashes, an object that is redescribed and recontextualized here. The staples in the narrator’s scalp in “Bad Sex” appear on Martin’s head in the first chapter. The bathtub. The stone steps. The airport bar, the jewelry store, the psychiatric hospital.
Truman Capote once floated a theory about the necessity of writerly repetition in an old Maysles-brothers documentary. “If you want to move someone else as an artist, you yourself necessarily must have been deeply moved by what it is you are writing. But you must keep exploiting that emotion in yourself over and over and over and over until you’ve become completely cold about it. Or fairly cold.” Capote is possibly drunk as he is saying this, losing his train of thought and gesticulating with a tumbler of vodka in his left hand. “So that you no longer laugh, say, about whatever it is that made you laugh. Or you don’t weep about whatever made you weep. You see it like it was an extraordinary specimen.”
The “over and over and over and over” that Capote describes has more than a little in common with the therapeutic dialogue. The act of blunting an emotional response or neurosis through the reënactment of it is a primary mechanism of psychoanalysis. But, for Capote and many other writers, the repetition, as well as the blunted, distanced perspective that comes with it, was something to be kept secret and concealed in unpublished drafts. The nakedness that defines Martin’s body of work is that the repetition has not been concealed from us. When we read him repeatedly moving a setting from fiction to interview to essay to memoir—the jewelry-store bathroom, for example—we are seeing a mind active on the page, exploiting the emotion for version after version of the story.
Take the material that became Martin’s second novel, “Bad Sex.” He mentions in the acknowledgments that it had begun as a work of autobiography, and that the editor Lorin Stein had suggested he rewrite it as a novel. It was published first in a limited edition titled “Travels in Central America,” and was then acquired by the late editor Giancarlo DiTrapano, heavily edited, and republished as “Bad Sex.” Throughout all of those changes, key elements appear—a long affair, a ruined marriage, a relapse into secret drinking, an airport-bar bender, a fall during a blackout—that have since reappeared in his essays and now find themselves reworked again, with greater distance and different insights, in this book. The fictional bathtub that Brett attempts suicide in at the end of that novel becomes in many ways indistinguishable from the bathtub that lands Martin in the psychiatric hospital in this memoir. This shifting back and forth between fiction and nonfiction—considering an event from one angle, then another, then another—has a way in Martin’s hands of accumulating a sum greater than its parts.
Trying to parse the story of a character that is sometimes named Bobby Clark, in “How to Sell,” and sometimes Brett, in “Bad Sex,” and sometimes Clancy Martin (though there is also the question of which Clancy Martin), all of whom may have experienced a good number of the same things, is not necessarily unlike the experience of attending a group meeting or a counselling session and trying again to tell one’s story. One of the strange things that substance abuse can cause is a feeling of discontinuity. There are the blackouts, the decisions that seem to be made by someone else entirely, and the stories that witnesses have to tell you about yourself. As Martin points out, it is not accidental that storytelling is central to A.A. and other support groups. Trying to reconcile a fractured set of details or anecdotes into a continuous narrative, trying to glean new insights in each retelling, is a key part of the work. Rather than highlighting a blunted, distanced perspective, Martin’s repetitions show the emotional work up close, as it is undertaken: ambivalently, uncomfortably, and not necessarily in logical order.
Near the end of this book, Martin frets about what actual advice he can give a fellow-sufferer. What about the one reading along with him in the hope of an answer to this book’s title? He settles for a long and essayistic list of the things he does to get through the day, patched together with familiar tactics, obscure thinkers, and quotes from memory and e-mails with friends. It is idiosyncratic, beautiful, and studded with caveats: sometimes this trick won’t work, Martin concedes, and sometimes this other one won’t, either. Even he doesn’t always follow his own advice. It’s an admission of sorts—that so much great literature can be read, that so much work can be done, but that another day to survive is always approaching. The work of choosing to not kill yourself isn’t the act of making that choice one time but making it over and over again. ♦
