How Not To Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind
By Clancy Martin
Pantheon Books, 2023

Any readers who were bothered by the way Clancy Martin’s 2009 fiction debut How To Sell managed to be both droning and greasily self-pitying may be briefly appalled by the title of his new book, a big work of nonfiction titled How Not To Kill Yourself, imagining that the author somehow thinks the echo is clever, despite the incredibly serious nature of the new book’s subject. It’s one thing for a younger author to be quippy in a self-indulgent piece of autofiction, but it’s widely different to be quippy about suicide. 

How Not To Kill Yourself isn’t quippy, thank whatever gods may be, although it’s understandably self-indulgent. Martin is an accomplished person: author of both fiction and a shelf of philosophical works and translations, professor of philosophy at two different universities. But he’s struggled with alcohol and drug addiction for most of his life, and, as he makes clear immediately in this new book, he’s made several attempts over the years to take his own life. 

His father was an almost overwhelming presence in How To Sell, and he’s a similarly persistent ghost in these pages, with Martin returning to both his life and his squalid death, and what both might mean for his own. “The way his life ended, whether he killed himself or some sudden, mysterious respiratory disease swooped down and destroyed him almost overnight, alone, incarcerated, surrounded by other homeless people who’d lost their minds – my dad, the same man who’d taught me all that I believed in – well, I knew where I could wind up, how badly my own life could end,” Martin reflects. “And I can see now, too, that the many times since that I have tried to kill myself, I feel that I have permission to do it, because my father is not alive to reproach me if I should fail, or to suffer that disappointment in me if I should succeed.” 

Suicide is in his book’s title, and sharp insights about suicide mingle in these pages with urgent advice for both suicidal readers and people who know them. “If you can call someone, do. Show them that there are people out there who want them to go on living,” he writes. “And you can always remind them that this feeling will pass. Tell them it feels irrefutable and inescapable, but if they can just hang on for another day, their very own mind will bring help.” 

But even so, this is mostly a book about alcoholism. The two subjects are connected statistically, of course; about 25 percent of chronic alcohol or drug users kill themselves, and alcohol is involved in one-third of all suicides in the US. But in How Not To Kill Yourself they’re also connected with a personal intensity Martin has never achieved before. He offhandedly mentions at one point that “you can never truthfully tell your psychiatrist how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking, because they will use it against you,” (it gets more confusing the more you think about it) but the raw confessionality on the subject of alcoholism certainly feels honest. 

Maybe transgressively so, when it comes to the book’s many, many pages detailing Martin’s experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous. The book is full of vivid, novelistic scenes set in meeting rooms where confidentiality is sacrosanct, and at one point Martin wonders if maybe the “grisly stuff” he’s relating shouldn’t be written anonymously. He stresses how important these personal scenes are for him, saying that “personal connections with real individual people are what has made possible my freedom from addicted and self-destructive thinking,” but he likewise admits that he didn’t exactly consult any of those individual people before he collected what are fairly clearly recognizable portraits and transcripts. “I probably should have told my group, ‘Listen, I’m a writer, and I’m going to be writing about some of my experiences here, but I’ll change names and I won’t report any details of the stories other people have shared within meetings,’” he writes. “That’s what I should have done, but I didn’t do that.”

This is maybe the book’s most regular pattern, grimly reflecting its subject matters: the things that should have been done but weren’t. The thorough absence of easy homilies makes Martin’s parting appendices of practical advice all the more stark. His endless bleak stories of broken people and broken promises charge these final coachings with genuine urgency. 

Martin is right: How Not to Kill Yourself is grisly stuff. This is a powerful, almost unbearably personal book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.