PositiveThe New YorkerWriting 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 repeatedly shows us how much good advice he knows and yet has not followed ... Martin risks the limits of his reader’s sympathy. ... We are seeing a mind active on the page, exploiting the emotion for version after version of the story ... 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 ... Martin’s repetitions show the emotional work up close, as it is undertaken: ambivalently, uncomfortably, and not necessarily in logical order.
