What do you think?
Rate this book
Losing Tim: The Life and Death of an American Contractor in Iraq
From one of America's most distinguished authors, an unforgettable look at a mother's love and strength in the wake of a son's suicide. Burroway welcomes readers to grieve alongside her, while providing a lens into how soldiers, like her son, are haunted by their combat experiences. It is a bracing, beautiful read, gorgeous in its language and emotional honesty. Jonathan Shay, author of "Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character," comments in the foreword: "To me, the pain recalls Homer's 'Iliad.'" And Pulitzer Prize winner Madeleine Blais calls it "an elegy and a call to action." It is nothing less than that.
- GenresMemoir
160 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 2, 2014
1 person is currently reading
93 people want to read
About the author
Janet Burroway
34 books80 followersJanet Burroway is the author of seven novels including The Buzzards, Raw Silk (runner up for the national Book award), Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone; a volume of poetry, Material Goods; a collection of essays, Embalming Mom; and two children's books, The Truck on the Track and The Giant Jam Sandwich. Her most recent plays, Medea With Child, Sweepstakes, Division of Property, and Parts of Speech, have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and various regional theatres. Her Writing Fiction is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and a multi-genre textbook, Imaginative Writing, appeared in 2002. A B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. from Cambridge University, England, she was Yale School of Drama RCA-NBC Fellow 1960-61, and is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 27, 2014
This is a gorgeous book by one our finest authors in Janet Burroway who takes the reader through the stages of grief when she loses her eldest son, Tim, who was a soldier in Iraq, to suicide. Not since Joan Didion has an author so thoroughly examined the inner life of grief and loss and does so in such spare, exacting and graceful language. This book will add to the canon of great books on loss in America and will do much to help families navigate their way through the unthinkable event of a loved one's suicide.
March 29, 2014
A poignant memoir of a Mom whose son committed suicide -- a former Army Ranger who was a contractor in Iraq. The book is very moving in a curious way. It's no overwrought outpouring of grief from a stricken mother.
Instead, it's an intense first-person journal of the numbing haze and bewildering physical, mental and emotional slog a parent goes through in trying to piece together an unimaginable loss. The author struggles to connect the dots across the arc of her son's life: how should she remember him? How does she reconcile the impact on the spirituality and morality of her very soul?
Janet desperately tries to find answers. But all she can find are memories that form a jumbled patchwork of her life and her son's life. For in the end, perhaps that's all life is.
A moving story of one woman's journey through darkness and light.
Instead, it's an intense first-person journal of the numbing haze and bewildering physical, mental and emotional slog a parent goes through in trying to piece together an unimaginable loss. The author struggles to connect the dots across the arc of her son's life: how should she remember him? How does she reconcile the impact on the spirituality and morality of her very soul?
Janet desperately tries to find answers. But all she can find are memories that form a jumbled patchwork of her life and her son's life. For in the end, perhaps that's all life is.
A moving story of one woman's journey through darkness and light.
March 4, 2014
This is a beautifully written book by one of the country's most esteemed authors. (My husband fondly remembers Burroway's bible on writing from his creative-writing master's program.) Although it deals with tough subjects (motherhood, loss, depression), it is anything but a downer. Burroway takes you in from the beginning and wraps you up in lovely, compelling descriptions of her life, her loved ones and her emotions. The empowerment she gains from her experiences is inspirational.
It's a cliche, but this one is truly hard to put down.
It's a cliche, but this one is truly hard to put down.
March 27, 2014
This is a moving memoir by a mother who losing her son to suicide. This mother also happens to be an awarding-winning author, which is how I discovered the book. It is definitely not a light read, but the prose is brilliant and you won't be able to put it down.
One of the best books I've read in recent memory.
One of the best books I've read in recent memory.
April 7, 2014
In April 2004, the author Janet Burroway TITLE and TITLE, received a phone call with the news that her son, Tim Esseylinck, who had served in the US Army and then for a private contractor removing mines in Iraq, had shot himself. Deliberately. Fatally. Losing Tim: The Life and Death of an American Contractor in Iraq is her story, that of a mother trying to understand her son’s suicide amidst her grief.
Suicide is the most bitter of deaths to swallow for those left behind. It is ultimately incomprehensible to those outside the psyche of the individual who has, as in Tim’s case, pulled the trigger. This she knows but still can’t resist trying. “It’s often late at night that I come face to face with the facts of Tim’s last days, knowing that no one knows what it was like for him, but asking what it was like, making it up, imagining the conversation we will never have.”
A therapist friend has told her, “You have to come to some understanding that is satisfying to you.” So, being a writer, she naturally puts pen to paper in that pursuit. “This dogged syntax is how I unlock sense in the fleeting world,” she explains.
In her taut and terse style, Burroway reviews her son’s life through the lens of his death, looking for clues that might have foretold it, wondering how it might have ended differently. She considers her divorce when Tim was young, her short-lived second marriage to a much younger man, her Vietnam vet boyfriend whom Tim idolized, her excessive drinking and her permissive parenting and the role may have played in his suicide, but she refrains from morose self-recrimination. Instead, she leads the reader through her process of groping toward some meaning to his life by which she can frame his death.
There are moving moments when she breaks down in the supermarket at the sight of mothers with young boys, when mail arrives at her house addressed to Tim, when she receives a message after inadvertently sending an email to his address: “permanent fatal error.” There are also well-intentioned friends saying the wrong thing and one even acknowledging her gaffe with the gesture of pointing a finger to her temple and clicking her thumb. And there are sweet recollections of her son climbing trees in his childhood or visiting her house on breaks. You can feel the weight of her memory when she addresses him directly, “I am homesick for you, Tim.”
In her reflection, Burroway finds two patterns to her son’s life: “an abiding need for family and the pull for adventure.” She sees him seeking that blend of adventure and a “fictive family” in the military and later the contractor’s mission, drawn to the structure and completeness absent in his family of origin, only to be betrayed, ultimately disillusioned by the greed and corruption that crushes his idealistic patriotism to the point where he declares, “I am ashamed to be an American.” So, too, does Burroway, a pacifist of the Sixties mold, indict the system and despair that the labor department does not keep track of suicides among former private contractors: “Among the war dead of these American adventures, my son, literally does not count.”
Burroway does stop short of fingering one cause for his final act, whether it be that disillusionment, the struggles with his wife and stepson, the challenge of transitioning to civilian life after leaving Iraq or even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There are some things, she realizes, she simply can’t know.
Yet she does pass along insights that she has stumbled upon in her decade of grief since her son’s death. “We tend in America to look for change in epiphanic moments. We want the instant diet, the meteoric success, the Ravishing, an Aha! of healing. But moving on is not a sprint, and not really a triumph of the human spirit. It is the doggedness of the world at your doorstep, doggedly knocking . . .One day you laugh, and quickly apologize to the beloved dead. One day a memory comes back shorn of grief, bearing only sweetness.”
And in these days she begins her healing, not in a simple, tidy way–grief is messy, unpredictable and relentless–but in a gradual acceptance. Near the end of the book, she discovers: “loss is another word for longing. At some point you realize that more of your life is behind you than ahead. You were told to ‘live in the moment,’ but you almost never did. On the contrary, the moments were tainted by wishing they would pass, or regretting the past, or anticipating something more wonderful. It’s now, in retrospect, that their luminous significance is revealed.”
Thus does she find her satisfaction and so, too, do we her readers.
Suicide is the most bitter of deaths to swallow for those left behind. It is ultimately incomprehensible to those outside the psyche of the individual who has, as in Tim’s case, pulled the trigger. This she knows but still can’t resist trying. “It’s often late at night that I come face to face with the facts of Tim’s last days, knowing that no one knows what it was like for him, but asking what it was like, making it up, imagining the conversation we will never have.”
A therapist friend has told her, “You have to come to some understanding that is satisfying to you.” So, being a writer, she naturally puts pen to paper in that pursuit. “This dogged syntax is how I unlock sense in the fleeting world,” she explains.
In her taut and terse style, Burroway reviews her son’s life through the lens of his death, looking for clues that might have foretold it, wondering how it might have ended differently. She considers her divorce when Tim was young, her short-lived second marriage to a much younger man, her Vietnam vet boyfriend whom Tim idolized, her excessive drinking and her permissive parenting and the role may have played in his suicide, but she refrains from morose self-recrimination. Instead, she leads the reader through her process of groping toward some meaning to his life by which she can frame his death.
There are moving moments when she breaks down in the supermarket at the sight of mothers with young boys, when mail arrives at her house addressed to Tim, when she receives a message after inadvertently sending an email to his address: “permanent fatal error.” There are also well-intentioned friends saying the wrong thing and one even acknowledging her gaffe with the gesture of pointing a finger to her temple and clicking her thumb. And there are sweet recollections of her son climbing trees in his childhood or visiting her house on breaks. You can feel the weight of her memory when she addresses him directly, “I am homesick for you, Tim.”
In her reflection, Burroway finds two patterns to her son’s life: “an abiding need for family and the pull for adventure.” She sees him seeking that blend of adventure and a “fictive family” in the military and later the contractor’s mission, drawn to the structure and completeness absent in his family of origin, only to be betrayed, ultimately disillusioned by the greed and corruption that crushes his idealistic patriotism to the point where he declares, “I am ashamed to be an American.” So, too, does Burroway, a pacifist of the Sixties mold, indict the system and despair that the labor department does not keep track of suicides among former private contractors: “Among the war dead of these American adventures, my son, literally does not count.”
Burroway does stop short of fingering one cause for his final act, whether it be that disillusionment, the struggles with his wife and stepson, the challenge of transitioning to civilian life after leaving Iraq or even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There are some things, she realizes, she simply can’t know.
Yet she does pass along insights that she has stumbled upon in her decade of grief since her son’s death. “We tend in America to look for change in epiphanic moments. We want the instant diet, the meteoric success, the Ravishing, an Aha! of healing. But moving on is not a sprint, and not really a triumph of the human spirit. It is the doggedness of the world at your doorstep, doggedly knocking . . .One day you laugh, and quickly apologize to the beloved dead. One day a memory comes back shorn of grief, bearing only sweetness.”
And in these days she begins her healing, not in a simple, tidy way–grief is messy, unpredictable and relentless–but in a gradual acceptance. Near the end of the book, she discovers: “loss is another word for longing. At some point you realize that more of your life is behind you than ahead. You were told to ‘live in the moment,’ but you almost never did. On the contrary, the moments were tainted by wishing they would pass, or regretting the past, or anticipating something more wonderful. It’s now, in retrospect, that their luminous significance is revealed.”
Thus does she find her satisfaction and so, too, do we her readers.
March 27, 2014
Beautifully written narrative that on the surface is one mother's story about the death of her son. But Burroway's text offers greater truths about the nature of modern war, heroism, depression and grief. Her elegant writing lets us share in her grief, anger, confusion and, most of all, love for her son and her family. And it brings to light a little-discussed issue: The impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the many private military contractors who served there.
March 29, 2014
"Losing Tim" is terribly relevant to my experience, losing my daughter to the business of war and all the soul-killing poison it spawns. Genuine and straightforward, Burroway's artfully disciplined writing manages to signal flashes of the forever absurd world a mother is thrust into when her child is suddenly gone. I am indebted to her for the courage, skill and honesty she so generously offers by speaking of the unspeakable.
September 16, 2018
Everyone who has lost someone close to them via suicide should have this book. Truly a beautiful read and tribute to Tim.
March 27, 2015
This was a really good read; the only reason it doesn't have 4 stars is that I'm not really a memoir fan. I would recommend this book to people looking for an insightful book about loss, military contractors, and being a parent. It felt like a very personal exercise for the author, but it was still universal and enlightening. While the topic isn't a "happy" one, this book is still hopeful. I haven't read any of the author's fiction, but she demonstrated a lot of skill, and is very interested in words and language.
February 19, 2016
I have so many questions after reading this book. At the top of my list is, why is it so hard to find a copy out there? This book is heartbreaking and superb. Burroway writes a memoir that is balanced, fair, and intimate. What really happened in Iraq, and why at one point did the suicides of our soldiers begin to outnumber their combat deaths? Personal truths and military influences are weighed carefully and thoughtfully by one of the finest writers I've encountered. Highly recommended.
August 13, 2016
Compelling narrative and it's a story I'm glad I know. I use one of Burroway's texts in my mixed genre creative writing class and it's a really great book. With this memoir, I felt the last 25% could have used deep revision--it felt almost like a series of compiled notes.
April 17, 2015
Incredible story written by one of the masters of literature. Heartbreaking, honest, funny, and brave.
May 2, 2015
Perhaps this would speak to me more if I had lost someone to suicide but (luckily) right now, it doesn't engage me at all.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews