In his new memoir on suicide, Clancy Martin shows that the work of choosing to not kill yourself isn’t the act of making that choice one time but making it over and over again.
The Martin we meet in “How Not to Kill Yourself” is a writer desperately working to find a way to be honest. After describing an attempt to end his life and the ways that he tried to lie or avoid questions about it, he introduces the two conflicting thoughts that have shaped his life: “” He has tried to take his own life more than ten times.
In a 2009 interview, the novelist Tao Lin asked Martin, who had just published “How to Sell,” when he was the closest to ending his life. Martin described his morning routine at the jewelry store: he’d wake up early, drink coffee, and get sick to his stomach. Then he’d go to the bathroom with a gun, do a few lines of coke, and think about killing himself.
For a stretch in the middle, he devotes his attention almost fully to that task. He finds resonance between a Robin Williams riff on Marc Maron’s podcast and a four-thousand-year-old text written on Egyptian papyrus. He works through a history of intellectuals who made suicide pacts. He corresponds with Margo Jefferson, who tells him about the obligations of survival for Black women and prompts him to think about the intersection of race and suicidal ideation.
Truman Capote once floated a theory about the necessity of writerly repetition in an old Maysles-brothers documentary. “If you want to move someone else as an artist, you yourself necessarily must have been deeply moved by what it is you are writing. But you must keep exploiting that emotion in yourself over and over and over and over until you’ve become completely cold about it. Or fairly cold.
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