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From a Suicide Expert, an Unflinching Guide to Saving Lives
After 10 attempts and years of suffering and addiction, Clancy Martin describes facing the darkness in his raw memoir “How Not to Kill Yourself.”
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HOW NOT TO KILL YOURSELF: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, by Clancy Martin
Some titles are blunt instruments, and “How Not to Kill Yourself” is the bluntest I’ve encountered yet in this job. The book it describes, by Clancy Martin, is a doozy: messy, confessional but ultimately beneficent. Casting a harsh high beam on a growing societal problem, swaddled in mental-health resources and caveats, it doesn’t so much illuminate as irradiate.
At 55, Martin, a prolific philosophy professor and essayist, has had more lives than a cat. He has written two novels, married three women (as discussed in a previous personal work, “Love and Lies”) and fathered five children. And he has survived 10 suicide attempts — the first of which was jumping in front of a bus at 6, like one of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies.
His subsequent efforts were as varied, if more grimly purposive, as the death-obsessed male protagonist’s stagings in “Harold and Maude,” or Bill Murray as Phil Connors, trying to escape the time loop in “Groundhog Day.” (The author’s own many movie references include Nicolas Cage’s “Bringing Out the Dead” character seeing ghosts. “I believe in ghosts,” Martin writes, “and I think suicidal people can see into the world of ghosts in a way that sturdier folks cannot.”)
In an era of trigger warnings and social contagion worries, recapping specific details of these attempts feels risky, like forwarding someone a set of Google Maps to the great beyond, but to give an idea:
Spurned by a girlfriend at 16, Martin swallowed Librium pills, drank half a bottle of whiskey, took off his clothes and lay down in a bed of snow, hoping to leave “a naked, frozen corpse as a witness of my devotion and her betrayal.” (He was rescued by a passer-by.) At 17, he tried to jump out of a moving car. In his 20s, when he worked in a jewelry store with two brothers and developed a coke problem, he acquired a Glock 17, a gun being “the hand of death itself.” (He now denounces firearms fiercely.) There was an episode in a claw foot bathtub and another in his basement with a dog leash.
But crucially, Martin has not “succeeded” (scare quotes mine; this is scary stuff); his “failures” at self-destruction are, of course, his success.
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