Messy, confessional but ultimately beneficent ... This is a rough-cut book, not a polished gem... but I can see it becoming a rock for people who’ve been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is, and want to understand the mentality, which can seem utterly mystifying to the unafflicted.
The book is a blend of genres: part memoir, part self-help, part philosophical and literary exploration. I would even suggest it is part novel. All of this makes the book odd, as it constantly doubles back on itself to interrogate the very things that it is doing and saying. It is filled with trigger warnings, caveats, apologies and statements of mistrust ... Cautions circulate around his uncertainty about how to talk about his own experiences. Martin is constantly painted into a corner and he knows it ... Martin writes about the books that made him more suicidal, moving between philosophy, poetry and literature. He ultimately warns against them, despite the massive airtime they receive in his narrative ... Having written this piece, I too am now implicated, having enticed others to read this book and enter the long genealogy of suicide literature. I admire this book, admire what it wants to do and be. Whether it helps, I think, might depend on which side of the wall between hope and hopelessness that the reader is on.
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 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.
Unique ... Martin has been writing on the topic of suicide for years, he has been generous in informally counseling people afflicted with the view that life is nothing more than affliction. In the final chapter, he offers a loving and useful 40-plus-page collection of straightforward advice aimed at people with a flagging will to live ... A riveting and inspiring read for anyone who has had to keep company with the chthonic feeling that the breath of life is a curse.
A blunt and bracing read ... At times, reading How Not to Kill Yourself feels like the white-knuckle experience of fresh sobriety ... Martin turns his attention to a trio of writers who died by suicide: Édouard Levé, David Foster Wallace, and Nelly Arcan ... This is the one place How Not to Kill Yourself falters. It’s not Martin’s esteem for his subjects that is the problem, but rather his decision to reverse engineer their books, looking for evidence in the material they left behind.
Disturbing, thoughtfully composed ... Not one to gloss over any aspect of his difficult journey, the author dissects the thorny dilemma that has tormented him since childhood. With dark humor intact, he humanizes it in a way that makes it palatable for readers chronically haunted by suicide—or those whose lives have been touched by it.
