Description

A sublimely elegant fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family This stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinsons dictum to tell it slant Sinkhole richly layers personal familial political and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential heartbreaking truth

In 2009 Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family Her fathers father had taken his own life so had her mothers Over the weeks and months that followed grieving and in physical pain Patterson kept returning to one question Why Why had her family lost so many men so many fathers and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold

In three graceful movements Patterson explores these questions In the winter of her fathers death she struggles to make sense of the losssifting through the few belongings he left behind looking to signs and symbols for meaning As the spring thaw comes she and her mother depart Minnesota for her fathers burial in her parents hometown of Pittsburg Kansas A onceprosperous town of promise and of violence against people and the land Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes There Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathersone a fiery prolabor politician the other a melancholy businessmanshe never knew And finally she returns to her father to the haunting subjects of goodbyes of loss and of how to break the cycle