How to Write a Suicide Note: Serial Essays That Saved a Woman's Life

by Sherry Quan Lee

How to Write a Suicide Note examines the life of a Chinese/Black woman who grew up passing for white, who grew up poor, who loves women but has always married white men. Writing has saved her life. It has allowed her to name the historical trauma--the racist, sexist, classist experiences that have kept her from being fully alive, that have screamed at her loudly and consistently that she was no good, and would never be any good-and that no one could love her. Writing has given her the creative power to name the experiences that dictated who she was, even before she was born, and write notes to them, suicide notes.
Sherry Quan Lee believes writing saves lives; writing has saved her life. Acclaim for How to Write a Suicide Note "How to Write a Suicide Note is a haunting portrait of the daughter of an African mother and a Chinese father. Sherry dares to be who she isn't supposed to be, feel what she isn't supposed to feel, and destroys racial and gender myths as she integrates her bi-racial identity into all that she is. Through her raw honesty and vulnerability, Sherry captures a range of emotions most people are afraid to confront, or even share. Her work is a gift to the mental health community."
--Beth Kyong Lo, M.A., Psychotherapist "Sherry Quan Lee offers us, in How to Write a Suicide Note, a deep breathing meditation on how love is under continuous revision. And like all the best Blues singers, Quan Lee voices the lowdown, dirty paces that living puts us through, but without regret or surrender."
Wesley Brown, author of Darktown Strutters and Tragic Magic "I love the female aspects, the sex, and the strong voice Sherry Quan Lee uses to share her private life in How To Write A Suicide Note. I love the wit, the tongue-in-cheek, the trippiness of it all. I love the metaphors, especially the lover and suicide ones. I love the free-associations, the 'raving, ravenous, relentless' back and forth. Quan Lee breaks the rules and finds her genius. How to Write a Suicide Note is a passionate, risk-taking, outrageous, life-affirming book and love letter."
Sharon Doubiago, author of Body and Soul, Hard Country; and other works Learn more about the author at www.SherryQuanLee.com Book #2 in the Reflections of History Series from Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com Modern History Press is an imprint of Loving Healing Press

Genres: Poetry, Memoir

100 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published June 6, 2008

About the author

SHERRY QUAN LEE, author of How to Write a Suicide Note (2008) approaches writing as a community resource and as culturally based art of an ordinary everyday practical aesthetic.

Love Imagined: a mixed race memoir (2014), Modern History Press is a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award.


Quan Lee teaches Creative Writing at Metropolitan State University, Saint Paul, Minnesota,

You can learn more about Sherry Quan Lee and view more of her work at www.SherryQuanLee.com.

Reviews

[Celine Walde · Rating 3 out of 5]

i loved the honesty in this collection. not a super favorite, but i really enjoyed the writing style. some of my favorite poems from the book is written down below.

«the writer resists the writing, the poet resists the prose, the woman resists the man, the child resists the mother, the city resists the country, youth resists old age, survival resists suicide; and, then I write.»

«How to separate the evil from the good. How to separate the need from the love. How to know the men from the women. How to know the end from the start.»

«To end a relationship is a process. What worked for the last ending, won't work for the next one, for this one.»

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

An introspective memoir in poetry by a woman whose mother was black and whose father, who left when Quan Lee was five, was Chinese. Growing up, Quan Lee was able to pass for white or, failing that, to emphasize her Chinese heritage for the sake of being "exotic;" one father-in-law was even allowed to believe she was Polynesian. Such flexibility of her apparent race leads not only to a crisis of identity for Quan Lee, but a sense of invisibility, the cure for which, her introduction suggests, was several suicide attempts. The suicide notes become a means for her to let go of what is harmful in her life (lack of self-esteem, self-denial, invisibility) while extolling the healing powers of writing. I'll be honest: the subject matter, stream of consciousness writing style, and very personal nature of Quan Lee's revelations make this book at times difficult to read. There were definitely times when my emotions came to the surface and I had to put it down for a bit. However, her writing speaks against choosing what is easy over what is true, or favoring the comfortable over the candid, so I persevered, in the end feeling exhausted but also moved and inspired. This is a book I will turn to often when I am afraid to confront my own dark places, tempted to seek my sense of self from others, or forgetful of just how much writing can do.